The Behavior of Teachers and the Productive Behavior of their Pupils

THE RECENT history of education in the United States is marked by numerous attempts to evaluate the competence of teachers. In view of the importance of formal education in contem porary society, such a preoccupation is readily understood. The findings of competence studies have, however, been inconsistent and unconvinc ing. Many reasons may be advanced to account for this slow progress in the study of the teach er's effectiveness. Foremost among these is the fact that there is little agreement on a basic definition of the good teacher. Under such con ditions, when fundamental issues remain unre solved, it is almost inevitable that the results of even the most rigorous research should be se verely criticized. Such conflicts, essentially philosophical in nature, will not be resolved by this present study. The purpose of this re search is to provide some objective evidence up on which ultimate value judgments may be based. In many competence studies, the c r i t e rion measures have been defined a s the opinions of experts, supervisors, and principals. The weak ness of such measures is that logically and ex perimentally it has been relatively easy to dem onstrate that they are often not significantly re lated to pupil change, growth, development?al though these variables are generally recognized as valid criteria of teacher competence. On the other hand, when pupil change has been adopted as the criterion measure and has been operationally defined, the usefulness of the find ings is severely restricted by limitations in the instruments and techniques at present available for the measurement of subject-matter achieve ment, of growth in social and learn ing s k i Ils, and of changes in attitudes. To these two com plications a third may be added: the difficulty of identifying a specific teacher to whom such changes can be attributed?a problem that be comes especially acute in the departmentalized grades. The focus of the present study is an investiga tion of the relationships between certain specific, observable behaviors of teachers and the amounts of required work and class-related self-initiated work performed by their pupils. Three crucial factors are involved in the research design. The first is that the criterion measures are taken i n terms of the amount of work performed by the pupils. Such consequent measures avoid the dis advantages of ratings by principals and supervis ors. They fall short, however, of measuring pu pil change. Nevertheless, it is felt that pupil work is very closely related to pupil change in the learning sequences of the classroom.. If it is at present impracticable to measure pupil change, then the measurement of pupil work as the vari able intervening just prior to such change may be a productive concept. A second important element of the research is the use of specific, clearly defined classroom be haviors of teachers as the independent variables, in c o n tradistinction to the fairly common use of a sort of global variable called "competence". The third major factor in the design of this study is its reliance upon the reports of pupils as the most important source of data concerning their work and the behaviors of their teachers. Although the teachers' ratings of the pupils' work and the principals' reports on the behaviors of their teachers are both included in the data col lected, the primary emphasis is upon the data se cured from pupils, since they are in an excellent position to report on their own work and on the be haviors of their teachers.

Field of study: Education