Many students bored in class

Fairfax Media

FADE OUT: A new survey shows students lose interest in school as each year passes from Year 7 to Year 10.

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More than half of 14-year-old Kiwi schoolchildren are often bored in class, a new survey shows.

Schools are so interested in the new figures they are buying reports to compare how engaged their students are compared with the rest of the country.

The New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) survey of about 8500 students from more than 50 schools was released in the Seeing Yourself in Science report issued late last week.

It shows students lose interest in school as each year passes from Year 7 to Year 10.

A scale measured student attitudes to school.

At Year 7, girls scored an average of 63 and boys 57. By Year 10, both boys and girls dropped to 53. A score of 55 was the level at which students said they were often bored in class.

"If you had anybody scoring down around 20 at the bottom of the scale, you would have to say that they would be very sad students who probably had some things going on in their lives that were nothing to do with school at all," said Rose Hipkins, a NZCER chief researcher and co-author of the report.

The report says there is an emerging trend for disengagement with science learning in Year 7 and 8 students. Disengagement from science sat within a general trend to disengagement from school.

Students who left school at 16 had started disengaging in early primary years.

"At 12, the young people who left school by 16 were giving up, playing up and increasingly alienated, and this trend was even more marked at age 14," the report says.

Hipkins said that while the number of students reporting boredom was a concern, there were also positive sentiments expressed by the same students. A score of 55 included sentiments that their culture was treated with respect, they were proud to be at the school and their classes were not a waste of time.

She said there was a lot of interest from schools in the survey data.

Schools were able, for the first time, to buy data about the attitudes of their students.

"They can get the data for their own individual school and see it compared to the national pattern, so they can get a snapshot of how their students are compared to students nationally," Hipkins said.

The report highlights the need for a continued shift in curriculum and teaching methods to respond to the more individualistic "late-modern youth".

"They've got hugely more choices than we had. They're used to everything being personalised and individualised for them," Hipkins said.

"They have a level of flexibility that simply wasn't available to us because of the way society was organised."

- © Fairfax NZ News