A course was developed to provide foreign student teaching assistants (TAs) with improved classroom presentational skills. Class size was kept small and classes were offered once each week for two hours to give students sufficient opportunities to practice speaking. Relying heavily on student oral presentations, the teachers assigned progressively…

A functional typology of verbal instructional tasks for advanced classroom instruction and inservice training is described and illustrated in this paper. The described typology is based upon functional definitions of elementary and conceptual behavior and incorporates the kinds of goals and objectives that surveys and research have shown to be…

The objectives of this study were (1) to determine parents' levels of satisfaction with the care and nurturing their children receive in family day care homes; (2) to determine predictors of parent satisfaction with the homes; and (3) to determine the impact parent feedback has upon reinforcing strengths and correcting deficiencies in these homes.…

The ways in which students' perceptions of teacher behavior in the elementary school classroom clarifies the relationships among teacher expectations, student expectations, and student achievement are examined. Subjects in two data sets consisted of 234 grade 4-6 students from 16 classrooms in an urban, ethnically mixed school district, and 101…

A major problem in teacher education is the maintenance of beginning teachers' idealism in the face of practicing professionals' pragmatism. Teacher education programs train students in theories, concepts, and practices only to assign them to public schools, where the antithesis of everything the program attempted to teach is an accepted,…

Since a review of the literature shows that reading comprehension is primarily a reasoning, thinking process, a procedure called P. L. O. R. E.--an acronym for predicting, locating, organizing, remembering, and evaluating textual material--is suggested as offering a sound theoretical framework on which to base active comprehension instruction.…

This volume describes the process, findings, and implications of a complex research project known as the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study (BTES). A major contribution of the study is its focus on Academic Learning Time (ALT) as a measure of learning. ALT is the amount of time a student spends engaged in academic tasks of appropriate difficulty.…

The theory of "reasoned action" is applied to the teaching-learning process. This theory asserts that people use the information available to them in a reasonable manner to arrive at their decisions and that a person's behavior follows logically and systematically from whatever information he has available. To illustrate application of the theory…

Differential treatment of students by teachers (degree of warmth and friendliness) is helping to account for the failure of low-achieving students. Warm, friendly teacher behavior does not affect student academic achievement directly. Achievement requires effort-engagement on the part of the student as a necessary but not a sufficient condition…

Research on the cognitive processes involved in teaching is reported. Experienced teachers were observed and interviewed in an effort to determine the following: 1) how the teacher perceives the class and individual students; 2) how the teacher interprets information gathered through perception; 3) how the teacher uses information acquired through…

School teaching is becoming essentially and not merely marginally a genre of political behavior. For most contemporary teachers, most of the time, work consists of interpreting diverse ideological pressures, and attempting to appease those who produce these pressures in a manner that will allow them to retain their positions, self respect, and a…

This paper presents a model for conducting educational job analysis and the field test of that model on ten teaching fields. This model was tested for its ability to job analyze a teaching field's content knowledge according to federal employment guidelines. Differences between teaching and other job fields meant that actual time spent on a skill…

This paper traces the evolving relationship of a teacher and a researcher who shared life in a kindergarten/first-grade classroom for an academic year. Their relationship became the basis for new ways of thinking about the social and academic competencies of children in the classroom, and for new ways of thinking about the aims and conduct of…

Approaches to educational research are grouped into five major categories. The process-product approach correlates teacher behavior with student achievement. Aptitude-treatment-interaction researchers believe that their research will identify instructional methods that are particularly suitable for students with specific aptitudes. Researchers in…

This paper describes the data collection, data analysis, and findings that point to the importance of instructional context as a factor in understanding the concepts teachers use when they process information about pupils in their classrooms, and the predictions they make about pupil success in learning. Three aspects of context are examined: (1)…