Study Of Instructional Improvement Research Articles

Conceptualization of Numbers, Number Operations, and Algebra among 10th and 11th Grade Students

The current study explores the conceptual understanding of secondary level students in mathematics. The participants were 1320 students of 10th grade and 180 students of 11th grade randomly selected from 33 public secondary and 17 higher secondary schools of Lahore. The article describes the performance of students on six grade 1-7 level questions related to numbers, number operations, and algebra. One question was knowledge level and rest five were analysis level questions. Four questions were related to Knowledge of primary level Content and Students that required participants to analyze the error or explanations related to the problem. The other two questions were related to middle school content knowledge. The questions were adapted from Hill et. al. (2004)s instrument of Study of Instructional Improvement (SII). The success rate of students was ranging from 52.8 to 63.8 % on six questions and from 22 to 73.5 % on 15 sub-questions.

Can the use of informal control mechanisms increase trust among teachers? An evaluation of the Accelerated Schools intervention

The Accelerated Schools Program (ASP) mobilizes a cohesive set of informal control mechanisms as a part of its approach to school-wide improvement. However, despite their frequent use in educational settings, the empirical investigation of the nature and function of organizational controls in building trust in schools has been largely overlooked in the educational literature, particularly from within a causal research framework. This study employed a propensity score matching approach to data from the Study of Instructional Improvement, a longitudinal study of the design, implementation, and instructional effectiveness of three widely-adopted comprehensive school reform models including Accelerated Schools. This quasi-experimental approach permitted the isolation of ASP’s effect on growth in teacher-teacher relational trust over time while controlling for implementation depth across the 54 schools and 1561 teachers in the sample. Analysis revealed a robust treatment effect of the ASP model on growth in teacher-teacher relational trust over time. Several components of the informal control process also produced positive change in teacher-teacher trust growth over time, including critical dialogue, innovation and risk-taking, and collective responsibility.

Riding the Implementation Curve: Teacher Buy-In and Student Academic Growth under Comprehensive School Reform Programs

AbstractWhile teachers have long been acknowledged as a key part of educational innovation, research has largely neglected the impact that their buy-in has on reform initiatives. This study addresses this problem by examining the association between teacher buy-in and student academic growth under school reform programs, with a particular focus on how that relationship changes over time. Using multiyear data from the Study of Instructional Improvement, we arrived at two important findings. Counterintuitively, we found that teacher buy-in is negatively associated with student achievement in general. However, after controlling for program age, we also found that, in schools with more mature reform programs, higher teacher buy-in had a significant positive relationship with students’ academic growth in all sampled subject areas. These findings provide useful insights into school reform policies, as well as important empirical evidence on the actual role of teacher buy-in in students’ achievement.

Principals’ Data-Driven Practice and Its Influences on Teacher Buy-in and Student Achievement in Comprehensive School Reform Models

ABSTRACTThis study investigates: (1) how principals’ data-driven practices may vary by principals’ and school backgrounds and how that changes over time; (2) how principals’ data-driven practices influence teacher buy-in; and (3) how principals’ data-driven practices and teachers’ buy-in influence student outcomes. This study uses data from the Study of Instructional Improvement (SII). More-experienced principals tend to be less data-driven than less-experienced principals. The more likely principals are to use data in their practices, the more teachers buy into the programs, and experienced principals tend to improve school-level teacher buy-in. Collective teacher buy-in improves over three years and is positively associated with students’ reading achievement.

Studying Reading Instruction With Teacher Logs: Lessons From the Study of Instructional Improvement

This article describes some of the conceptual and methodological issues that arise when researchers use teacher logs to measure classroom instruction. Data and examples come from the Study of Instructional Improvement, which used teacher logs to study patterns of literacy instruction in schools implementing three comprehensive school reforms. Over the course of this study, more than 75,000 logs were collected from nearly 2,000 teachers in Grades 1 through 5. This article discusses why teacher logs were chosen as the data collection strategy, various psychometric issues associated with their use, and some of the substantive findings that emerged as part of the study.

An Empirical Investigation of Professional Development Effects on Literacy Instruction Using Daily Logs

The author examined the effects of professional development (PD) on literacy instruction using 75,689 lessons from 1,945 classrooms in 112 schools participating in the Study of Instructional Improvement. Stratifying over 94 pretreatment covariates, including prior instruction, the results revealed the importance of PD as a lever for changing teacher practice. Teachers receiving intense PD in comprehension offered 10% more comprehension instruction than teachers not receiving intense PD. Similarly, teachers receiving intense PD in writing offered 13% more writing instruction and had students write 12% more text than other teachers. Furthermore, these estimates may be lower bounds, because they were estimated over a single year and because there was demonstrated potential for additional influences of the school context.

Using Teacher Logs to Measure the Enacted Curriculum: A Study of Literacy Teaching in Third‐Grade Classrooms

In this article we examine methodological and conceptual issues that emerge when researchers measure the enacted curriculum in schools. After outlining key theoretical considerations that guide measurement of this construct and alternative strategies for collecting and analyzing data on it, we illustrate one approach to gathering and analyzing data on the enacted curriculum. Using log data on the reading/language arts instruction of more than 150 third‐grade teachers in 53 high‐poverty elementary schools participating in the Study of Instructional Improvement, we estimated several hierarchical linear models and found that the curricular content of literacy instruction (a) varied widely from day to day, (b) did not vary much among students in the same classroom, but (c) did vary greatly across classrooms, largely as the result of teachers’ participation in 1 of the 3 instructional improvement interventions (Accelerated Schools, America’s Choice, and Success for All) under study. The implications of these findings for future research on the enacted curriculum are discussed.