## **2.2.1 Classroom observation training**

To pilot the CLASS tool in Guangdong, a team of World Bank researchers and experts from Teachstone prepared a five-day training course, held in September 2016. The CLASS instrument and relevant training materials were translated into Chinese by the World Bank. Teachstone trainers traveled to China with the World Bank team to deliver the training. Thirty-three individuals participated in the training to become classroom raters. They were from the Guangdong Department of Education, as well as from selected normal universities and teaching colleges in the province. There was a mix of PhD candidates, university professors, department heads and deans, and education officials.

At the end of the training, the classroom raters had to pass a certification test to be able to participate in the data collection exercise. A passing score was 80 percent. Of the 33 recipients of training, 28 passed. An extract of classroom observation protocols, adapted from Teachstone materials, is in Box 2.

# **2.3 The CLASS instrument**

A classroom observation tool to measure the quality of teacher–student interactions, CLASS is subjectagnostic and has been applied across countries and grades, from pre-primary through secondary school. It is based on developmental theory and research that demonstrates that interactions between teachers and students are the primary mechanism through which children learn. CLASS is one of the most widely researched lesson-observation instruments, with over 150 studies conducted. The efficacy of CLASS as a measure of instructional quality has been supported by studies involving thousands of classrooms and tens of thousands of students across age levels. Collectively, these studies indicate that classroom quality, as measured by the CLASS, predicts positive developmental and academic outcomes for children (e.g. Hamre et al. 2012).

While most of the research on CLASS has been conducted in the United States, an expanding body of research is international, and applicability of measurement systems at this level is an important step, especially when assessments are not focused on objective knowledge, such as how to solve a math equation, but rather on subjective measures of student–teacher interactions (e.g. Pakarinen et al. 2010; von Suchodoletz et al. 2014).

CLASS is designed around a student-centered learning environment, while Chinese classrooms have traditionally been focused on examining lessons in terms of curriculum and learning goals. The early childhood instrument for CLASS has been implemented in Guangdong and was shown to be valid (Hu et al. 2016), but has not yet been validated at the Upper Elementary level.

Issues regarding the applicability of CLASS to the Chinese context were raised both by raters and peer reviewers, who emphasized the differences between Chinese and U.S. classrooms and attitudes toward education (see section 2.4). These concerns are valid. As documented in the sections that follow, all statistical measures, both on inter-rater reliability and the outcomes of the measurement tool, are equivalent to U.S. comparator studies. This supports the usability of CLASS in the Chinese context.

The exact actions that CLASS observes vary by grade, but there are broad overlaps in the general categories of behaviors. This assessment used the Upper Elementary CLASS tool, which has 12 dimensions. Eleven dimensions are aggregated under three domains, while Student Engagement is its own separate category (table 3).

4