Questions about students' competence in classrooms are addressed in three parts: the suitability of ethnography as a research strategy, a summary of research that examines the social organization of classroom events, and the consequences of this organization for students' performance in the classroom. The discussion of methodology leads to the…

Two models for research on teacher thinking are discussed: the decision-making model and the information-processing model. Research on teaching guided by the decision-making model focuses upon explaining and understanding deliberate teacher activity and is deemed more appropriate for situations in which the teacher has sufficient time and…

Underlying the current use of ethnography in the study of teaching and learning is the assumption of an analogy between the school or classroom and culture. The claim of educational ethnography is that it discovers and describes the ways that members of the school community create and share meaning. Ethnographers aim to discover the operating…

Five studies identifying the relationships between teacher behavior and pupil achievement are reviewed. The purpose of the review is to report the most practical implications for teacher education. The behaviors listed in these studies represent only those teacher processes, skills, or performances that have exhibited statistically significant…

This paper reviews selected findings from two traditions of educational research--process-product research and sociolinguistic research. The first research method generally focuses on the teacher and identifies teacher behaviors (processes) that correlate with student outcome measures (products). Sociolinguistic research focuses on communicative…

This book is devoted to a systems analysis of the teaching process in a single slum school classroom in which the teacher was a participant-observer researcher. The research approach used in the study is termed the "microethnography of the classroom" and is derived from social and behavioral theory. Chapters are devoted to the methodology of this…

Designed to create a foundation for collaboration between research on teaching and research on reading, this critical review of teacher effectiveness first provides a historical perspective as a means for creating a "common ground" between the two fields. Teacher effectiveness findings are then presented in two major categories. The first examines…

Validity is a central issue in use of self-report data for the investigation of teacher thinking. "Triangulation," or use of several data sets to test, corroborate and elaborate each other, is one method for increasing validity of findings. This paper illustrates a process of triangulation of data obtained by three different data…