Teaching Practices and Student Achievement: Evaluating Classroom-Based Education Reforms

摘要

A number of recent efforts to improve mathematics and science instruction have focused on professional development activities designed to promote instruction that is consistent with professional standards such as those published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The National Science Foundation's Systemic Initiatives (SI) program is an example. We gathered data from 11 SI programs and investigated relationships between student achievement and the teachers' use of standards-based instruction. We used multiple measures of student achievement, and pooled results across the 11 sites using a planned meta-analytic approach. We observed small but consistent positive relationships between teachers' use of standards-based instruction and student achievement, but we were unable to detect any differences across types of achievement measures. Our data and results suggest a number of limitations of methods that are currently used for implementing and evaluating reforms, and provide some lessons for future evaluations of reforms that promote instructional change.