An Experimental Study of Effective Teaching in First-Grade Reading Groups

The Influence of Experience on the Beginning Teacher

Change Processes and Strategies at the Local Level

? 1978 by The University of Chicago. 0013-5984/78/7803-0010$00.88 Pupils who fall behind their classmates academically fall further behind each year they remain in school (1). Part of the explanation for their continuing failure to keep pace with other pupils may lie in the fact that they spend less time on academic tasks than other pupils. The reason for such self-defeating behavior may be the desire to maintain self-esteem. If a pupil expends less effort on schoolwork than the average pupil, any resulting failure may be easier to accept. Pupils who try but fail may conclude that they do not have the ability to succeed. Pupils' involvement in tasks would seem to be a necessary condition for school achievement. If pupils are to master material, they must engage in it and react to it-read, make response. Indeed there are data to suggest that achievement is related to time for learning and opportunity to learn (2, 3). Similarly, there are data to suggest that learning is also positively related to low rates of time lost because of poor management of classrooms, for example, lengthy transitions (4). The major purpose of the present study was to find out whether pupil involvement was different for high, middle, and low achievers. Also, we wanted to find out whether pupils generally were more involved in some subjects than in others and whether certain types of classroom activities were associated with higher or with lower levels of pupil involvement. We selected two different types of schools to find out whether pupils' characteristics affect involvement. School 1

School Reform: The District Policy Implications of the Effective Schools Literature

The Elementary School Journal Volume 82, Number 5 o 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0013-5984/82/8205-0006$01.00 For the past two weeks, Mr. Davis has been teaching his fifth-grade class how to add, subtract, and multiply fractions with like and unlike denominators. Each day he teaches the lesson by explaining the key concepts and skills to the class, working example problems on the board, and providingfeedback and positive reinforcement to the students. He then has students work practice problems at their seats. Mr. Davis has just completed teaching the lesson and is presently passing out the seatwork problems. Before instructing the students to begin work, he reviews the general problem-solving procedures with the students. For instance, he tells the students: "When adding fractions with unlike denominators, first you must find a common denominator. Then for each fraction, form an equivalent fraction using the common denominator. After you have done this you can add the fractions." When Mr. Davis has finished explaining, Jani begins working immediately and spends the rest of the class completing the problems. While she is working, Mr. Davis stops by her desk and notices that she is working the problems correctly. He then tells her she is doing the problems right and adds "Great job, Jani. Keep up the good work!" Depending on their particular theoretical orientations, educational psychologists would differ in their descriptions and explanations of Jani's successful performance of seatwork problems. Some psychologists would focus on the amount of time that Jani spent working on them. These psychologists would assert that Jani obtained a higher score than other students because she was on task more than the other students (see, e.g., Rosenshine 1979; Fisher et al. 1980).

The Elementary School Journal Volume 83, Number 2 ? 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 001 3-5984183/8302-0009$01o.00 Teachers approach their instructional tasks with a variety of perspectives and strategies that emphasize certain aspects of teaching and deemphasize others. For example, some teachers teach language skills using organized games, while other teachers teach the same skills by direct instruction. Teachers adopt different approaches to the same subject matter partly because their teaching situations differ. Their students may have different learning problems or their classrooms may have varied resources and facilities. Even in the

The Elementary School Journal Volume 85, Number 3 ? 1985 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 001 3-5984/85/8503-0003$01 .00 State policies intended to improve education generally try either to set educational standards or to shape the educational process. Although states also seek to improve education through the allocation of funds, in recent years they have placed more emphasis on regulation-setting standards in the form of tests to be passed or educational procedures to be followed. Some policies are targeted on students; others, on teachers. The policies, of course, also affect schools, school systems, and, in certain cases, schools of education. In this paper, however, we focus on how policies affect the teacher-learner relationship as it occurs in classrooms.

to general feelings such as liking/disliking of mathematics, nor is it meant to exclude perceptions of the difficulty, usefulness, and appropriateness of mathematics as a school subject. There are several ways affective variables are related to mathematics learning. It is likely that a student who feels very positive about mathematics will achieve at a higher level than a student who has a negative attitude toward mathematics. It is also likely that a high achiever will enjoy mathematics more than a student who

Recently the process-product paradigm for research on teaching has undergone revision. Notable among updates to this paradigm are what Doyle (1980) calls the "mediating process paradigm," or what Winne (1981) refers to as the "cognitive mediational paradigm." Both views postulate that teachers do not directly influence student product variables, such as achievement. Rather, teachers influence students by causing them to think and behave in particular ways during teaching. These mediating events, in turn, may lead to changes in outcome variables. Hence, the effects of teaching on learning may be mediated by students' behaviors and cognitive processing during instruction. The cognitive mediational paradigm opens up to question the match between ways researchers hypothesize that learners

Effective Schools: A Review

Perhaps the most vigorous movement in administration in recent years has been directed toward the development of a comprehensive theory capable of generating both hypotheses for guiding research and principles for guiding practice. Despite many specific advances in special areas, such as hospital administration, public administration, business administraton, and educational administration, there still is no general conceptual framework for systematizing and interrelating our knowledge within and among these areas. It is still impossible to speak of administration in terms that would be acceptable to, or for that matter even readily understandable by, students and practitioners in the several special fields. This failure to conceptualize administration on a general theoretical level has been a major obstacle to the development of administration as a rigorous discipline, and the elaboration of theory is accordingly receiving increased attention both in "research" and "applied" administrative settings. The purpose of the present paper is twofold: (a) to describe a socio-psychological theory of social behavior having broad application to the area of administration and (b) to illustrate the application of the theory to major issues in administration. The four major issues considered here are: the problem of institutional and individual conflict; the problem of staff effectiveness, efficiency, and satis-

The primary reference employed in this paper is to view schools as social organizations. Such a perspective calls attention to the structure of the social relations in the school as well as to norms, values, and other orientations shared by school personnel. The present study builds upon earlier research in which pupil control was seen as a central feature of the organizational life of schools.2 A major concern was the socialization of teachers with regard to pupil control ideology. It was hypothesized that as teachers were absorbed into the teacher subculture their pupil control ideology would become more custodial. Cross-sectional data confirmed the prediction that more experienced teachers would be more custodial than less experienced teachers.3 Subsequent longitudinal data on a sample of beginning teachers also showed a significant increase in the custodialism of pupil control ideology both after the student teaching experience and again after the first year of teaching.4 The purpose of this inquiry is to reexamine the pupil control ideology of the same sample of beginning teachers as they acquired their second year of teaching experience. Before the empirical phase of this investigation is reported, it seems appropriate to review the conceptual framework and rationale from which the major hypothesis was developed.

The Elementary School Journal Volume 81, Number 1 ? 1980 by The University of Chicago 0013-5984/81/8101-0008$0o1.00 In colleges and universities across the country, prospective and practicing teachers and administrators take courses on planning-curriculum-planning and instructional planning. During the courses, teachers and administrators usually study an objectives-first model of curriculumplanning. This model has four steps. Planners are expected to 1. Formulate objectives 2. Choose appropriate learning activities

added by over 1,000 teachers to a survey of teachers' practices. Results of the survey of 3,700 teachers in about 600 schools in Maryland are described in Becker and Epstein (in this issue). The teachers' comments reflect the variation in years of experience and in the number and types of contacts individual teachers have had with parents. Each theme can be viewed from two perspectives-there are potential advantages, but there are also potential problems, with any parent-involvement technique. Teachers' comments reveal their contrasting opinions on the benefits expected from parent assistance at home and on the organizational structures used to conduct parent-involvement activities. Some teachers are very positive about parent involvement; others have been discouraged by their attempts to communicate and work with parents.

The Elementary School Journal Volume 83, Number 4 ? 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0013-5984/83/8304-0006$01.oo00 An enduring concern in education is that research findings are not systematically utilized by classroom teachers to improve instruction. In 1975, we proposed that a way to accomplish this would be to include teachers in the inquiry process (Ward & Tikunoff 1976). Up to that time, the predominant educational research and devel-