TY - JOUR
T1 - Measuring complex features of science instruction
T2 - Developing tools to investigate the link between teaching and learning
AU - Thadani, Vandana
AU - Stevens, Ronald H.
AU - Tao, Annie
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation and an internal research grant from Loyola Marymount University. Early versions of this work were presented at the 2006 National Educational Computing Conference in San Diego, California, and at the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio, Texas. We thank Lisa Liu, Aqila Blakey, and Amy Gordon for their contributions during code development and for their work on coding and analyzing video; Dr. Marcia Sprang for her support throughout the data collection process; and the teachers who participated in this study. We also thank the corresponding editor; the reviewers of this manuscript; and our colleagues, Dr. Jennifer Abe and Dr. Adam Fingerhut, for their thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this article.
PY - 2009/4
Y1 - 2009/4
N2 - There is a growing national recognition that teachers and teaching are at the heart of successful educational reform. However, few tools exist for measuring classroom instruction. The primary purpose of this article is to describe methods we developed to measure and study teaching, specifically while teachers were using a multimedia intervention for promoting scientific problem solving. Lessons were videotaped, and coding schemes were developed to measure 2 aspects of teaching: (a) the lesson's organization, particularly whole-class instruction used to introduce problems and share students' work; and (b) the nature of tasks and questions given to students. Results showed that the coding schemes were reliable and that they detected differences in instruction across teachers. Qualitative analyses were consistent with the quantitative findings. The codes also captured features of teaching that would have been difficult to detect or verify with qualitative observations alone. Finally, we explored how these measures could be used with student outcome data to examine the relationship between teaching and learning in future studies. We argue that quantitative measures of instruction serve many purposes, not the least of which is allowing researchers to explore the relationship between teaching and student learning at a high degree of granularity.
AB - There is a growing national recognition that teachers and teaching are at the heart of successful educational reform. However, few tools exist for measuring classroom instruction. The primary purpose of this article is to describe methods we developed to measure and study teaching, specifically while teachers were using a multimedia intervention for promoting scientific problem solving. Lessons were videotaped, and coding schemes were developed to measure 2 aspects of teaching: (a) the lesson's organization, particularly whole-class instruction used to introduce problems and share students' work; and (b) the nature of tasks and questions given to students. Results showed that the coding schemes were reliable and that they detected differences in instruction across teachers. Qualitative analyses were consistent with the quantitative findings. The codes also captured features of teaching that would have been difficult to detect or verify with qualitative observations alone. Finally, we explored how these measures could be used with student outcome data to examine the relationship between teaching and learning in future studies. We argue that quantitative measures of instruction serve many purposes, not the least of which is allowing researchers to explore the relationship between teaching and student learning at a high degree of granularity.
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U2 - 10.1080/10508400902797941
DO - 10.1080/10508400902797941
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:70449580957
SN - 1050-8406
VL - 18
SP - 285
EP - 322
JO - Journal of the Learning Sciences
JF - Journal of the Learning Sciences
IS - 2
ER -