This document provides part of a final report to the Scottish Education Department on a study of student teachers' observations of and interviews with cooperating teachers. The purpose of the research was to help student teachers acquire an understanding of and control over teaching methods. The findings are from experiments with three samples of…

This manual gives teachers information about the score reports they receive after participating in the Tennessee Career Ladder evaluation process. It also contains a discussion of the scoring and equating process used to calculate the results. The score report consists of the following: (1) a summary; (2) results by domain; (3) results by…

A study sought to determine the extent to which cooperating teachers' narrative comments on weekly observations reflect six categories of beginning teachers' competencies and to ascertain the relationships among cooperating teachers' narrative comments, their midterm evaluations of student teachers, and their final evaluation of student teachers.…

It was noted that paraprofessional child caregivers working with economically disadvantaged children did not base instructional choices on data derived from direct observations. As a result, this practicum was implemented to improve the observation and recording skills of five caregivers serving as group leaders of day care workers. Centers…

Illinois Specialized Teacher Evaluation Programs (I-STEP), Incorporated, has developed a performance-based system for evaluating teachers. A review of the literature convinced I-STEP that evaluation programs are most useful if they are aimed at helping teachers improve their instructional effectiveness, and if they obtain evaluation data from many…

The competency based teacher education (CBTE) program at the University of Toledo (Ohio) is constructed around ten basic goals which are behaviorally stated and cover the fundamental tenets of the American educational system. To evaluate the program, the goals were examined in relation to five contexts which were identified as being of major…

Described in this article are the Teacher Performance Evaluation materials and techniques that are part of the School Improvement Model project, which endeavors to improve teacher and administrator performance with the ultimate goal of improved student learning. According to the author, this project utilizes new teacher evaluation technology…

The use of time in school, specifically the portion of time defined as active responding time, has been shown to correlate significantly with achievement. The comprehensive observational methodology of the academic engaged time studies provides the basis for systematically investigating student responding time and elements of the educational…

The Assessments of Performance in Teaching (APT) is a classroom teacher performance evaluation procedure mandated by the South Carolina legislature for all student and first year teachers. Aiming to measure minimal competence, the instrument addresses five performance dimensions: planning, instruction, class management, communication, and…

A two-part study intended to investigate what constitutes successful teacher response to student writing is described in this report. The described study consisted of a survey of response practices of 560 elementary and secondary school teachers who were among the most successful in their communities as judged by directors of the sites of the…

Two different methods of collecting information about student activity in the laboratory were compared using a series of videotape recordings. One method was based entirely on the systematic observation of student behavior (interaction analysis); the second method involved students describing their laboratory activities while watching excerpts…

Observer reliability and the confusability of codes, two sources of error in the collection of classroom observational data, are examined. Confusability is defined as the extent to which one code is mistakenly recorded as another code. Observational data were collected in each of 172 first grade and 171 third grade Follow Through and comparison…

The effect of ESL (English as a Second Language) teaching techniques on student learning was investigated. A group of 18 ESL teachers and their classes were observed across four lessons having a similar content. Students were pre- and post-tested over a six-month period in two measures of language performance: oral comprehension and production.…

Systematic classroom observation instruments were used to study the relationship between student coping style and student growth in reading. Classrom behaviors were recorded in the fall and the following spring with the Coping Analysis Schedule for Educational Settings (CASES). Data were analyzed separately for two types of classroom setings:…

A 4-year project, Conceptions of Reading, was established to provide information about how teachers use reading theories and models and other conceptions as they plan and carry out reading instruction. The nature of the methodology dictated that the over-all goal of the project be to characterize how teachers think about reading and their reading…