THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHER EDUCATION AND SCHOOL INFRASTRUCTURE ON THE PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS IN THE AREA OF NATURE SCIENCES
ENEM. Student performance. Teacher training. School infrastructure. Quality of education.
Education is provided for in the Federal Constitution of Brazil of 1988 as a right for everyone and a duty of the State and the family. Its principles include free public education, valuing education professionals and guaranteeing a minimum standard of quality. Despite the advances that Basic Education has achieved over the years, large-scale assessments have shown that Brazilian students have deficits in basic reading, science and math skills. However, these results are not always contextualized with the reality of Brazilian schools. The present work investigates the performance of students from state public schools in the ENEM test of Natural Sciences of 2017, by comparing the performance of students from different types of public schools in rural and urban areas of all Brazilian regions. School infrastructure, training and teacher qualification in student performance were also assessed. For that, we used the microdata from the National High School Examination (ENEM) and the Basic Education School Census, for the year 2017. Using the average grades of Brazilian state schools in the ENEM Natural Sciences test, and data relating to school infrastructure, teacher training and qualification, obtained from the microdata of the School Census, the database for this research was set up. To assess whether a different score between different types of schools (Civic-Military, Vocational, Regular, Mediation, EJA and Indigenous) and between commercial schools in rural and urban areas, an Analysis of Variance-ANOVA was used, while the influence of school infrastructure, teacher training and qualification, on student performance, was assessed using multiple linear regression. The performance of students varies in terms of the type of school attended and in terms of location. Students from Civic-Military schools had the highest performance, while students from indigenous schools had the lowest performance, in the same way that students from schools in urban areas performed better than students from schools in the rural área. School infrastructure, teachers working in their areas of teacher training and qualification are factors that influence student performance and may partially explain the variation in grades. In conclusion, students from schools that have a higher percentage of teachers trained in the area of Natural Sciences (physics, chemistry and biology) and have an infrastructure at the highest levels, obtained a higher performance in ENEM in the area of Natural Sciences.