Disengagement, rather than disruptive behaviour, is the route cause of many of the problems in the state’s schools, according to a survey conducted by the University of South Australia.

The Behaviour at School Study (BASS) surveyed almost 1400 South Australian teachers in a bid to assess how they viewed student behaviour and what actions they were taking to modify poor behaviours in the classroom.

The results show that the key challenges faced by teachers is the difficulty in finding ways to encourage active and engaged learning in their pupils.

The study’s lead researcher, Dr Anna Sullivan, says that while extreme disruptive and violent incidents in the classroom get a lot of airtime, results show that these are relatively uncommon.

“More than 60 per cent of the teachers surveyed, reported that the unproductive student behaviours encountered were at most, pretty innocuous,” Dr Sullivan says.

“It seems our real issue is students simply tuning out. This almost passive resistance to learning in class and doing homework was the most reported behaviour of concern with 43 per cent of teachers reporting students ‘avoiding doing schoolwork’ as a key problem.”

The data show that teachers found talking out of turn (50%); avoiding doing schoolwork (43%) and disengaging from classroom activities (41%) were among the most common problems with students.

“The study has clearly supported the theory that it is the more passive negative behaviours that we need to be looking at, not only because they are more prevalent, but also because they are harder to fix by ‘step’ systems of behaviour management,” she says.

A copy of the full report, Punish them or engage them? Teachers’ views on student behaviours in the classroomis available online at www.bass.edu.au