Research tells us that teachers can make
a tremendous difference in student achievement. As a result, many
education reform efforts, including the No Child Left Behind Act
of 2001, have focused on improving the quality of teachers.
But what exactly do highly effective teachers
do in their classrooms to help students learn at higher levels?
Research tells us that one key trait of effective
teachers is their use of instructional strategies that work.
Through a meta-analysis of more than 30 years
of research on classroom instruction on student achievement, McREL
researchers identified nine categories of instructional strategies
that have a high probability of improving student achievement, listed
in the chart below.
Instructional practices
associated with higher levels of student achievement
Category
Definition
Identifying similarities & differences
Helping students compare, classify, and create metaphors
and analogies
Summarizing & note taking
Helping students analyze, sift through, and synthesize information in order to decide which new information is most important to
record and remember
Reinforcing effort & providing recognition
Teaching students about the role that effort can play in
enhancing achievement and recognizing students for working toward
an identified level of performance
Homework & practice
Providing students with opportunities to learn new information
and skills and to practice skills they have recently learned
Nonlinguistic representations
Helping students generate nonlinguistic representations of
information, including graphic organizers, pictures and pictographs,
mental pictures, concrete representations, and kinesthetic activity
Cooperative learning
Creating opportunities for students to develop positive interdependence,
face-to-face interaction, individual and group accountability,
interpersonal and small group skills and group processing
Setting goals & providing feedback
Helping students set their own learning goals in order to
establish direction and providing students with timely feedback
about their progress
Generating & testing hypotheses
Helping students generate and test hypotheses through a variety
of tasks, through systems-analysis, problem-solving, historical
investigation, invention, experimental inquiry, and decision-making
Activating prior knowledge
Helping students retrieve whatthey already know
about a topic
It's important to note, however, that these strategies
are designed to be used at different times, in different contexts,
and to address different learning objectives. Simply put, no instructional
strategy works equally well in all situations.
Finally, it’s
important to bear in mind that while McREL researchers have attributed
13 percent of the variance in student achievement to teachers (see
school
improvement), instruction is but one of three teacher characteristics
that affect student achievement. The other two are classroom management
and curriculum design.
