Researchers at the Institute for Research on Teaching (IRT) at Michigan State University studied how teacher behavior influences what youngsters learn and how teaching can be improved. IRT found that how teachers teach is as important to student learning as what they teach. IRT found that many teachers believe they do a good job and don't see the…

Especially when engaging students in activities on Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, teachers frequently ask questions that, from an educational standpoint, are useless. The most useless of these questions is, "Do you understand?" because comprehension is not a binary process. Understanding has many phases and levels, and a "yes" or "no"…

A report from the Educational Resources Information Center at the National Council of Teachers of English; includes ERIC abstracts of documents pertinent to this topic. (RD)

This paper reports research on differences between teaching in the primary and intermediate grades. Hypotheses concerning differences in teacher behaviors, teacher communications, grouping, teacher control, and types of materials were developed. Six 1st- and 2nd-grade classes and five 4th- and 5th-grade classes were observed for four 45-minute…

Examines the influence of training on three middle school teachers' use of guides for three levels of comprehension during content area lessons. Those teachers who had acquired high levels of knowledge through training in goals and procedures tended to shift and adapt the distribution of questions they asked students. Views these adaptations as…

This document describes the construction, implementation, and implication of selected high inference measures applied in a study of teacher effectiveness in the third, fourth, and fifth grades. Selected independent variables served as hypotheses regarding which behaviors are likely to occur during concept instruction and which are likely to be…

Problems in the second language classroom that hinder students from speaking the language freely and creatively arise from three sources: the teacher, the student, and the material. Problems involving the teacher include the common lack of an overall and inclusive definition of the course goal, the role and dysfunction of teacher "authority" in…

This study examines the relationship between selected teacher and student verbal behaviors occuring during social science concept instruction and the residual class mean scores of third, fourth, and fifth grade students on a test of the social science concept specialization. Twenty pre-service teachers and two experienced teachers were the teacher…