Questions examined in the Educational Literature
Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, criticisms, lambastings will be most appreciated.
Helpful Links For better or worse, a good deal of the literature on education, or at least the literature that is bandied about in policy circles can be found on-line. These sites contain many of the reports used to answer the questions below.
Top nine studies that I feel would be most relevant in writing a supporting report.
1. What evidence is there on the importance of teacher quality in student achievement, in comparison with other factors like student SES status, school and class size, public/private school, etc?
2. What evidence is there on the forms of teacher preparation that are valuable for improving teacher quality- different kinds of graduate/undergraduate training, ongoing professional development programs, years and types of classroom experience?
3. What evidence is there about the effectiveness of different ways of conducting classroom teaching? In particular, some claim that lecturing is much less effective than encouraging active participation in the form of discussions, hands-on activities, field trips, etc.?
4. How important are teachers' expectations of student capabilities in shaping teaching performance and student performance?
5. How important is student motivation in shaping student performance? How important is perceived student motivation in shaping teacher performance?
The Smoke of Educational Research As I grew increasingly frustrated with the vast body of educational research, I started to develop a checklist or a decision tree to organize the ways in which I was coping with the literature. Just recently, however, I found a wonderful essay by Ellen Lagemann that laid out a much more concise road map than I had created. This page combines the two.