Conceptual review and meta-analysis of school effectiveness

Clarity: clear presentation adapted to suit the cognitive level of pupils.

Flexibility: varying teaching behaviour and teaching aids, organizing different activities etc.

Enthusiasm: expressed in verbal and non-verbal behaviour of the teacher.

Task related and/or businesslike behaviour: directing the pupils to complete tasks, duties, exercises etc. in a businesslike manner.

Criticism: much negative criticism has a negative effect on pupil achievement.

Indirect activity: taking up ideas, accepting pupils’ feelings and stimulating self-activity.

Providing the pupils with an opportunity to learn criterion material - that is to say, a clear correspondence between what is taught in class and what is tested in examinations and assessments.

Making use of stimulating comments: directing the thinking of pupils to the question, summarizing a discussion, indicating the beginning or end of a lesson, emphasizing certain features of the course material.

Varying the level of both cognitive questions and cognitive interaction.

In later studies effective teaching time became a central factor. The theoretical starting points of this can be traced back to Carroll’s teaching-learning model (Carroll, 1963). Chief aspects of this model are:

• 
  actual net learning time which is seen as a result of:
  perseverance and opportunity to learn;
  
• 
  necessary net learning time as a result of:
  pupil aptitude, quality of education and pupil ability to understand instruction.
  

The mastery learning model formulated by Bloom in 1976 was largely inspired from Carroll’s model, and the same goes for the concept of “direct teaching”.
Doyle (1985) considers the effectiveness of direct teaching, which he defines as follows:

1. 
   Teaching goals are clearly formulated.
   
2. 
   The course material to be followed is carefully split into learning tasks and placed in sequence.
   
3. 
   The teacher explains clearly what the pupils must learn.
   
4. 
   The teacher regularly asks questions to gauge what progress pupils are making and whether they have understood.
   
5. 
   Pupils have ample time to practice what has been taught, with much use being made of “prompts” and feedback.
   
6. 
   Skills are taught until mastery of them is automatic.
   
7. 
   The teacher regularly tests the pupils and calls on the pupils to be accountable for their work.
   

The question whether this type of highly structured teaching works equally well for acquiring complicated cognitive processes in secondary education as for mastering basic skills at the primary school level was answered in the affirmative (according to Brophy & Good, 1986, p. 367). However, progress through the subject matter can be taken with larger steps, testing need not be so frequent and there should be space left for applying problem-solving strategies flexibly. Doyle (ibid) emphasized the importance of varying the learning tasks and of creating intellectually challenging learning situations. For the latter an evaluative climate in the classroom, whereby daring to take risks even with a complicated task is encouraged, is a good means.
In the domain of classroom organization Bangert, Kulik & Kulik’s meta-analysis (1983) revealed that individual teaching in secondary education hardly led to higher achievement and had no influence whatsoever on factors like the self-esteem and attitudes of pupils. “Best-evidence-syntheses” by Slavin (1996, p. 57) indicated a significantly positive effect of co-operative learning at the primary school level.
Meta-analyses by Walberg (1984) and Fraser et al. (1987) found the highest effects for the following teaching conditions:

• 
  reinforcement
  
• 
  special programs for the educationally gifted
  
• 
  structured learning of reading
  
• 
  cues and feedback
  
• 
  mastery learning of physics
  
• 
  working together in small groups
  

It should be noted that more recently developed cognitive and particularly constructivist perspectives on learning and instruction challenge the behaviouristically oriented approach and results of the process-product research tradition (Cohen, 1988; Resnick, 1987; Collins et al., 1988; Duffy & Jonassen, 1992; Scheerens, 1994; Brophy, 1996). According to the constructivist approach independent learning, meta-cognition (e.g. learning to learn), “active learning”, learning to model the behaviour of experts (“cognitive apprenticeship”) and learning from real life situations (“situated cognition”) should be emphasized. The effectiveness of teaching and learning according to these principles has not been firmly established as yet. Authors who have addressed this issue (Scheerens, 1994; De Jong & Van Joolingen, 1998) however, point out that a straightforward comparison with more structured teaching approaches may be complicated, since constructivist teaching emphasizes different, more higher order cognitive objectives. Moreover, structured versus “active” and “open” teaching had probably be better conceived as a continuum of different mixes of structured and “open” aspects, rather than as a dichotomy.