Classroom Characteristics Research Articles

Will Public Pre-K Really Close Achievement Gaps? Gaps in Prekindergarten Quality Between Students and Across States

Publicly funded pre-K is often touted as a means to narrow achievement gaps, but this goal is less likely to be achieved if poor and/or minority children do not, at a minimum, attend equal quality pre-K as their non-poor, non-minority peers. In this paper, I find large “quality gaps” in public pre-K between poor, minority students and non-poor, non-minority students, ranging from 0.3 to 0.7 SD on a range of classroom observational measures. I also find that even after adjusting for several classroom characteristics, significant and sizable quality gaps remain. Finally, I find much between-state variation in gap magnitudes and that state-level quality gaps are related to state-level residential segregation. These findings are particularly troubling if a goal of public pre-K is to minimize inequality.

Classroom assignments as measures of teaching quality

We investigate classroom assignments and resulting student work to identify important characteristics of assignments in terms of instructional quality and their validity as measures of teaching quality. We examine assignment quality within a large-scale project exploring multiple measures including classroom observations, teacher knowledge measures, and value-added estimates based on student achievement scores. Analyses included descriptive statistics, multivariate analyses to understand factors contributing to score variance, and correlational analyses exploring the relationship of assignment scores to other measures. Results indicate relatively low demand levels in all teacher assignments, a marked difference in score distributions for mathematics (math) and English language arts (ELA), and a substantial relationship between what was asked of and produced by students. Relationships between assignments scores, classroom characteristics, and other measures of teaching quality are examined for both domains. These findings help us understand the nature of and factors associated with assignment quality in terms of intellectual demand.

Supporting and Thwarting Autonomy in the High School Science Classroom

ABSTRACTThis investigation examined relations between adolescent students' daily and cumulative perceptions of teachers' practice and their experience of autonomy. Two-hundred and eighteen high school science students in 43 classes participated in a 6-week diary study. Multilevel modeling results suggested that perceptions of 8 out of 9 practices predicted a change in students' daily autonomy. Results also revealed that autonomy-relevant practices interacted with time, each other, and characteristics of students and classrooms. Implications are discussed.

Exploration of flipped classroom model in the medical laboratory English class

Specialty English of Medical Laboratory is a comprehensive and overlapping discipline and plays a major role in multiple medical courses, including Life Science, Clinical Medicine and Laboratory Medicine. However, its teaching practices are limited due to the extensive contents, scattered basic knowledge points, complexities of language learning processes and high demanding of sophisticated teaching skills. Since internet technology′s breakout and the web-based education expanding in the past decade, personalized flipped classroom has drawn considerable attention in the education field and became a hop-spot in teaching practice system. In the present study, the concepts of flipped classroom and basic characteristics of Specialty English of Medical Laboratory were elaborated, as well as the reconstructing teaching processes, exploring the concrete plan for teachers and students in undergraduate program.(Chin J Lab Med, 2017, 40: 641-642) Key words: Medical laboratory science; Foreign language curriculum; Teaching methods; Classroom teaching

Teacher's aides in kindergarten: Effects on achievement for students with disabilities

ABSTRACTOver the past 20 years, the number of teacher's aides in the United States has more than doubled, potentially in response to the growth of special education programs now taking place in general education schools. Surprisingly, little research at all has focused on the role that teacher's aides may play in improving student achievement, and no known study had examined this for students with disabilities. The author addressed this void by examining how teacher's aides link to achievement outcomes for students with disabilities in kindergarten. Using nationally representative data, the findings suggest that students with disabilities in full-day kindergarten have higher reading and mathematics outcomes at the end of kindergarten when the classroom has a teacher's aide. In contrast, there was no observed benefit for students with disabilities in part-day kindergarten. The size and strength of this relationship differs by individual characteristics and teacher and classroom characteristics. Implications are discussed.

The effects of student characteristics on teachers’ judgment accuracy: Disentangling ethnicity, minority status, and achievement.

Teachers’ judgments of students’ academic achievement are not only affected by the achievement themselves but also by several other characteristics such as ethnicity, gender, and minority status. In real-life classrooms, achievement and further characteristics are often confounded. We disentangled achievement, ethnicity and minority status and examined whether the achievement of ethnic minority students is judged according to the predominant expectation (expectation hypothesis) and whether teachers’ judgment accuracy is influenced by students’ ethnicity or their minority status (ethnicity hypothesis or minority hypothesis). We conducted 4 experimental studies with a computer simulation (the Simulated Classroom). In Studies 1 and 2 with N = 34 and N = 30 participants, we implemented Turkish (Study 1) and Asian students (Study 2) as minorities. In contrast to the expectation hypothesis, the expectations attributed to the achievement of ethnic minority students did not bias teachers’ judgments. In both studies we found greater judgment accuracy for ethnic minority students, thereby probing the ethnicity hypothesis. In Study 3 with N = 48 participants, we further disentangled ethnicity and minority using German students as minority students, thus probing the minority hypothesis. Again, minority students were judged more accurately. Implementing gender (male vs. female) as the minority characteristic in Study 4, with N = 52 participants, yielded the same result: Minority students were judged more accurately, therefore supporting the minority hypothesis. Thus, classroom characteristics need to be considered in research on teachers’ judgment accuracy to clarify the influence of individual student characteristics and composition effects beyond individual effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

Classroom Characteristics and Their Association with Nutrition Education Program Outcomes: A Multi-level Analysis of FoodMASTER Intermediate

To examine the relationship between student and classroom-level characteristics on nutrition knowledge after completion of the FoodMASTER Intermediate (FMI) integrated nutrition education program among 4th grade students, as compared to a similar group of control students. The sample consisted of n=263 students nested in 18 classrooms in North Carolina and Ohio. Nine classrooms used FMI and nine used traditional mathematics and science curriculum in a quasi-experimental design. Multi-level models were used to assess the relationship between student-level variables including: gender, free and reduced lunch status (as a proxy for student socioeconomic status), and baseline nutrition knowledge; classroom-level variables including: control or intervention status, teacher experience and teacher nutrition training on student nutrition knowledge at the conclusion of the program. A total of five models were built and analyzed using PROC MIXED and estimated using maximum likelihood in SASv9.4. Classroom-level variables including curriculum and teacher characteristics accounted for ∼56% of variability in nutrition knowledge after the program. The FoodMASTER intervention was found to be a significant predictor of nutrition knowledge. Students exposed to FMI score on average 4.32 points higher than control classrooms (p=.0001). Teachers with 8+ years of experience were found to improve predicted post-nutrition knowledge scores (p=.006). Based on these analyses, integrated nutrition education such as FoodMASTER significantly increases student nutrition knowledge. Further, there is a moderating influence of teacher experience indicating that effectiveness of nutrition education programs may be improved when administered by experienced teachers.

Predicting classroom acoustical parameters for occupied conditions from unoccupied data

This paper introduces a simple procedure for estimating the effects of occupants on the acoustical characteristics of university classrooms. Values of room acoustics parameters such as EDT, C50, G, Glate, STI and U50 are useful indicators of the quality of conditions for speech in rooms intended for speech communication. It is more difficult to measure these parameters in occupied spaces and hence being able to predict occupied values of these acoustical parameters from unoccupied measurements is a great asset to achieving acoustically successful classrooms. In this work it is shown that the changes at 1000Hz of EDT, C50, Glate, and U50 values, due to adding occupants, can be linearly related to the corresponding changes in total room sound absorption at 1000Hz. It has also been shown that changes in total room absorption due to adding occupants can be simply related to the total unoccupied room absorption. Combining these two relationships provides a simple procedure for predicting the values at 1000Hz of EDT, C50, Glate, and U50 values in occupied classrooms. These new procedures make it possible to design better classroom acoustics and to better understand acoustical problems when they occur.

The Design of Flipped Classroom Teaching Mode of College Students’ Oral English

With the deepening of the reform of college English teaching, the flipped teaching model has been widely concerned and aroused people’s discussion. The characteristics of Oral English Classroom are in accordance with this teaching model. The author puts forward some suggestions on the design of teaching process in order to improve the teaching of Oral English Teaching.

An Investigation of Teacher Candidates' Perceptions About Physical Dimension of Classroom Management

<p style="text-align:justify">The purpose of this research is to investigate teacher candidates’ perceptions about the physical dimension of classroom management. A hundred two 3rd year students at the Primary School Education Department of a state university were instructed to visit a primary school and to observe a classroom in terms of its physical dimensions. The students were guided both to tell about the actual classroom they observed and to tell about their dream classroom. Thus, this study aims to discover students’ perception on actual classroom and their construction of dream classroom in terms of physical characteristics. The research findings revealed that most of the teacher candidates mentioned their dream classroom according to the actual classroom and only one third of them designed the classroom according to their own dream classroom characteristics. Also teacher candidates did not mention the affective influences of physical layouts and environments on individuals.</p>

Acoustical characteristics of classrooms of tropical climate

This paper presents in-situ objective acoustical measurements and assessment of acoustical characteristics for the analysis of the classroom acoustics of the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT) located in Nagpur, India as a representative case. Nine classrooms of VNIT, Nagpur as representative classroom typologies are assessed and presented in this paper. The analysis based on in-situ measured indicators of room acoustic quality, such as reverberation time (RT30), clarity (C50), background noise (BN), and the speech transmission index (STI), permit the identification of certain salient features of classroom acoustics in a tropical climate like India and complementary practical challenges associated with natural ventilation. The paper concludes by outlining acoustic concerns observed in the objectively identified and investigated classrooms of a tropical climate of the representative case. The conclusions are also supplemented with few recommendations for acoustical retrofit measures.

Planilha de triagem acústica da sala de aula: tradução e adaptação cultural para o Português Brasileiro

RESUMO Introdução No ambiente escolar, os professores sentem-se incomodados em ministrar aulas em salas ruidosas e percebem a dificuldade dos alunos em ouvir a informação, constatando, assim, que o ruído não é apenas um incômodo, mas também um fator agravante, que interfere no rendimento escolar. Portanto, são imprescindíveis condições acústicas adequadas para o ambiente educacional. Atualmente, não há padronização da metodologia que deve ser utilizada para mensurações das características acústicas das salas de aula. Objetivo Traduzir e adaptar para o Português Brasileiro o protocolo “Classroom Acoustical Screening Survey Worksheet”. Métodos A tradução e a adaptação do protocolo incluiram tradução para o Português, adaptação linguística e revisão da equivalência gramatical e idiomática, assim como a validação de conteúdo, por meio de duas etapas: avaliação individual e reunião entre os especialistas. Resultados O protocolo foi traduzido e adaptado para o Português, resultando no instrumento “Planilha de triagem acústica da sala de aula”. O protocolo apresentou validade de conteúdo e, após apreciação e consenso dos especialistas, mostrou que a adaptação cultural do conteúdo foi clara e objetiva, sendo possível aplicá-la à realidade das salas de aula brasileiras. Conclusão O protocolo “Classroom Acoustical Screening Survey Worksheet” foi trazido e adaptado para o Português Brasileiro, sendo nomeado “Planilha de triagem acústica da sala de aula”. Estudos futuros deverão investigar sua aplicabilidade e efetividade na observação das características acústicas das salas de aula no cenário nacional.

Investigation of Educational Environments in Secondary Schools in Terms of Thinking Friendly Classroom Characteristics

This study aims to examine the level of thinking friendly educational environment in secondary schools in accordance with the opinion of students. The study is designed as a descriptive survey model research. Participants of the study were students of 5, 6, 7, and 8th grade in six secondary schools located in Adana central districts; 943 students participated to the study. The data was obtained by Thinking Friendly Classroom Scale (TFCS). In the analysis of the data independent samples t test and one-way analysis of variance have been used. One of the findings of this research is that the students perceive the level of thinking friendly environment in their classroom over average, as positively. According to the results when the grade level goes up, Thinking Friendly Class Scale scores go down. It has been seen that female students perceive their classes more thinking friendly than male students. Based on the results of the study, it is emphasized that thinking friendly classrooms could be formed only by forming thinking friendly schools. It is recommended that school managers, teachers, students, and parents altogether have an active role for creating thinking culture in the school as a whole and, having educational activities to create this culture.

Effectiveness of Large-Scale, State-Sponsored Language and Literacy Professional Development on Early Childhood Educator Outcomes

ABSTRACTThe current study investigated the effectiveness of large-scale, state-sponsored language and literacy professional development (PD) intended to improve early childhood educators' knowledge, beliefs, and practices. PD was offered in a real-world context and delivered at-scale across the state, implemented by an independent contractor. Educators (n = 535) were randomly assigned to participate in one of three types of PD: 30 hrs of language and literacy PD presented in a workshop format, 30 hrs of language and literacy PD plus monthly coaching, or PD on alternative topics (comparison). Baseline and outcome measures were collected by an independent research team to determine PD effectiveness. Growth curve analyses showed little change in educator outcomes over an 18-month period, with no differences among conditions or evidence of moderation by educator or classroom characteristics. Explanations for lack of PD impacts and the importance of evaluating educational investments are discussed.

How Teacher and Classroom Characteristics Moderate the Effects of Four Elementary Math Curricula

Research shows that some elementary math curricula are more effective than others at increasing student achievement. Most studies in this research base typically included teachers and classrooms that differ, so the results represent average curriculum effects, which raises an important question: Are curricula that are effective on average also effective among different types of teachers and classrooms? We examined whether curriculum effects are moderated by three characteristics that influence curriculum implementation and therefore may influence effects: (a) teachers’ knowledge, (b) teachers’ attitude toward math instruction, and (c) the extent to which teachers need to differentiate instruction in their classrooms. We examined these moderators for four elementary math curricula that use different pedagogical approaches and specifically for first- and second-grade achievement. We found that the two curricula that were more effective on average also were either as effective or more effective than the other two across all the contexts examined.

Social comparison, competition and teacher–student relationships in junior high school classrooms predicts bullying and victimization

This cross-sectional research examines how social comparison, competition and teacher–student relationships as classroom characteristics are associated with bullying and victimization among junior high school students in grades 7 and 8 in Canada. The study tests a conceptual model of youth outcomes that highlights the importance of modeling the effects of teaching practices as proximal structural conditions at the classroom level (N = 38) that affect bullying outcomes at the individual level (N = 687). Results of Hierarchal linear modeling (HLM) revealed significant classroom-level effects in that increased social comparison, competition and teacher–student relationships were related to bullying and victimization. An interaction for teacher–student relationships and gender also emerged. These findings may guide future intervention programs for junior high schools that focus on enhancing cooperation and pro-social behavior in classrooms. The findings could also inform programs that focus on building strong relationships between students and teachers to help prevent bullying and victimization, particularly among boys.

학급특성에 따른 보육교사의 정서지능이 정신건강에 미치는 영향: 다문화학급, 일반학급, 통합학급을 중심으로

학급특성에 따른 보육교사의 정서지능이 정신건강에 미치는 영향: 다문화학급, 일반학급, 통합학급을 중심으로

Do the smart get smarter? Development of fluid and crystallized intelligence in 3rd grade

There are conflicting theoretical assumptions about the development of general cognitive abilities in childhood: On the one hand, a higher initial level of abilities has been suggested to facilitate ability improvement, for example, prior knowledge fosters the acquisition of new knowledge (Matthew effect). On the other hand, it has been argued that school education with its special focus on promoting less able students results in a compensation effect. A third hypothesis is that the development of cognitive abilities is—as an outcome of the opposing effects—overall independent of the initial state. In this study, 1,102 elementary students in 3rd Grade worked on two versions of the Berlin Test of Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence at two time points with an interval of five months. Beside the question of how initial state and growth are related (Matthew vs. compensation effect), we considered performance gains in fluid intelligence (gf) and crystallized intelligence (gc) as well as cross-lagged effects in a bivariate latent change score model. Both for gf and gc there was a strong compensation effect. Mean change was more pronounced in gf than in gc. We considered student characteristics (interest and self-concept), family background (socio-economic status, parental education) and classroom characteristics (teaching styles) in a series of prediction models to explain these changes in gf and gc. Although several predictors were included, only few had a significant contribution. Several methodological and content-related reasons are discussed to account for the unexpectedly negligible effects found for most of the covariates.

Ecobehavioral Characteristics of Self-Contained High School Classrooms for Students With Severe Cognitive Disability

This study investigated educational experiences for students with significant cognitive disability (SCD) taught in self-contained high school classrooms. Nineteen students and nine teachers across five high schools and four school districts participated. A time-sampling method was used to describe the ecological, teacher, and student behaviors of these classrooms. Field notes were collected and analyzed as well. Results revealed that students in these classrooms were often passively engaged and had few opportunities to learn from rigorous curriculum. Instructors engaged in few practices known to be effective in supporting the learning of students with SCD. Finally, the classrooms themselves were often distracting and demonstrated little evidence of specialized or effective instruction. Implications for teaching and research are included.

‘Not hard to sway’: a case study of student engagement in two large engineering classes

ABSTRACTAlthough engineering education research has empirically validated the effectiveness of active learning in improving student learning over traditional lecture-based methods, the adoption of active learning in classrooms has been slow. One of the greatest reported barriers is student resistance towards engagement in active learning exercises. This paper argues that the level of student engagement in active learning classrooms is an interplay of social and physical classroom characteristics. Using classroom observations and instructor interviews, this study describes the influence of the interaction of student response systems and classroom layout on student engagement in two large active-learning-based engineering classrooms. The findings suggest that the use of different student response systems in combination with cluster-style seating arrangements can increase student engagement in large classrooms.