Identifying and Measuring Factors Related to Student Learning: The Promise and Pitfalls of Teacher Instructional Logs
Abstract
Existing measures have produced inconsistent and weak evidence for claims about the relationships among teacher content knowledge, classroom practice, and student learning. The ATLAST project has developed pairs of assessmentsfor teachers and studentsin three middle grades content areas: force and motion, flow of matter and energy in living systems, and plate tectonics. We used these instruments and classroom instruction information gleaned from teacher-generated logs to explore the relationships among teacher content knowledge, classroom instruction, and student learning. Our findings suggest the relationships among teacher knowledge, amount of instruction, and student learning depend on the science content; and that teacher instructional logs do not provide sufficient evidence to gauge the quality of instruction.View All Paper Session Presentations from the 2011 MSP LNC Conference