This review assesses the progress made in research on teachers’ pedagogical thoughts, judgments, and decisions over the past decade and identifies areas of substantive and methodological research needed to improve the practice of teaching. Based on this research, we formulate “schema” or tentative “models” of teachers’ judgments, planning decisions, and interactive decisions. We then set forth recommendations for future research, including (1) the need to develop a taxonomy of critical teaching decisions, which link these decisions to their consequences in the classroom; (2) the need to intervene and alter teachers’ plans and decisions in our research, as well as describe them, with the goal of improving teaching; and (3) the need to link recommendations based on research to the implementation of them in practice.

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Research on Teachers’ Pedagogical Thoughts, Judgments, Decisions, and Behavior:

The article analyzes the concept of student cognitive engagement, and the manner in which classroom instruction may develop self‐regulated learners. Since theory and research on academic motivation, to date only vaguely define the role of learning processes, and since studies of learning strategies rarely assess motivational outcomes, our analysis integrates these two streams of literature. We also identify specific features of instruction and discuss how they might influence the complex of student interpretive processes focal to classroom learning and motivation. Measurement issues and research strategies peculiar to the investigation of cognitive engagement are addressed.

The role of cognitive engagement in classroom learning and motivation

Classroom-process data indicate that teachers’ verbal praise cannot be equated with reinforcement. Typically, such praise is used infrequently, without contingency, specificity, or credibility. Often it is not even intended as reinforcement, and even when it is, it frequently has some other function. The meanings and functions of behaviors typically included under the category of teacher praise are determined by the degree of congruence between verbal and nonverbal components and by the context in which the interaction occurs. Much teacher praise is determined more by teachers’ perceptions of student needs than by the quality of student conduct or performance. Considerations of classroom feasibility and probable student response to teachers’ attempts at social reinforcement suggest that teacher praise should remain infrequent, but that it could be made much more effective. Attribution theory is an important supplement to social learning/reinforcement theory for suggesting guidelines for praising effectively.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1170249.pdf

Teacher praise : a functional analysis

In the 1st-ever use of event-history analysis to investigate discourse processes quantitatively, this study recasts understanding of discourse in terms of the (a) antecedents and (b) consequences of discourse participant "moves" as they (c) affect the inertia of the discourse and accordingly structure unfolding discourse processes. The method is used to compute the probabilities of the effects of particular discourse moves on subsequent discourse patterns and to measure and systematically contrast static (macrosocial) and dynamic (microsocial) conditions prompting and sustaining dialogic discourse. Theoretically, the authors draw on Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's epistemological distinctions between monologic and dialogic discourse to identify pedagogically rich sequences of teacher-student interaction as dialogic spells and discussion, which the authors' previous work has shown to contribute to achievement. Empirically, the authors examine data collected in hundreds of observations of more than 200 8t...

Arno A. Bellack

Papers

The language of the classroom

Curriculum and evaluation