This study focuses on standardized test administration in five elementary schools. The authors discuss how teachers affect test validity by altering standard test procedures in both planned and incidental ways. Each of the 16 voluntary teachers who participated in this study was observed in her/his classroom administering certain subtests of the…

The overall purpose of the national Head Start evaluation is to assess the impact, on the children and parents being served, of: (1) the educational services component of Head Start, and (2) a new demonstration program within Head Start, Basic Educational Skills. The evaluation deals with a total of 65 Head Start programs and their families. This…

Comparisons were made of qualitative and quantitative information collected in nine second grade reading classes in a study that examined the respective strengths and weaknesses of using such information to evaluate teacher behavior. Data that were collected included trained ethnographers' narrative observations of teacher behavior (the…

An instrument is presented for recording and analyzing student and teacher behavior in laboratory or activity-centered vocational education classrooms. The instrument uses categories of behavior, such as: (1) asks extended thought questions, (2) shows or illustrates, and (3) management of lesson, for teachers; and categories such as: (1) asks…

The development of a contextual classroom observation system is described. The system consists of an instrument, trained observers, data handling, and analysis. Thus, instrument development was necessarily paralleled by the development of training procedures, data recording and processing systems, programming, and analytic techniques. The…

The possibility that "coder drift" may be a source of bias in classroom observation systems was investigated in two parallel experiments using the Flanders System of Interaction Analysis. Coder drift may be described as the differences in coding which result when observers create their own idiosyncratic systems of classifying teacher…

The results of two experiments support the hypothesis of "coder drift" which is defined as change that takes place while trained coders are using a system for a number of classroom observation sessions. The coding system used was a modification of the low-inference Flanders System of Interaction Analysis which calls for assigning…

An approach for systematically observing and recording behavioral difference in the classroom is described, and its use with 11 behavior problem elementary students is discussed. The author points out the importance of peer sampling and the use of multiple observations to avoid erroneous conclusions. A case study of a second grade child…

The plans included in this manual were developed for use in training data collectors to administer the Teacher Performance Assessment Instruments (TPAI). They were designed by classroom teachers and present data collectors with types of plans which might be encountered while assessing teachers in the field. Each set of plans was developed to serve…

The purpose of this study was to examine the accuracy of teachers' abilities to identify problem children. Ninety-five third grade children served as subjects. Teachers designated each child as a conduct problem, withdrawal problem, or normal, resulting in 16, 14, and 65 children being assigned to the three groups. Behavioral observations, peer…

Qualitative and quantitative methodology in classroom observation were combined in this study that examined nine second grade reading classes. Each classroom was observed by an ethnographer and a classroom coder ten times throughout the year, and each observation lasted 90 minutes. For each classroom, four of the ten observations were also…

This study investigated social interactions and the development of social concepts in preschool children in terms of two conceptual domains, the moral and the societal. The former has to do with concepts of justice and fairness, the latter with social conventions, rules and social organization. Subjects were children 3 to 5 years of age enrolled…

Data is reported on observations made in high and low socioeconomic status (SES) classrooms of second- and third-grade teachers' feedback to students on their replies to questions posed by the teacher. Teachers in the study were chosen due to consistent effectiveness in producing student achievement gains. Interactions (teacher's question, pupil's…

An understanding of how children interact with reading material in educational settings is crucial to the understanding of successes and failures in teaching children to become skilled readers. This report describes the development of a plan for observing, describing, and coding reading activities in a representative sample of classrooms. The…

Three recent large-scale experimental studies have built on a data base established through several correlational studies of teaching effectiveness in elementary school. These three studies have in common a treatment that addresses several routine teaching tasks and suggests some principles and techniques for effectively fulfilling those tasks.…