---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michele Ben <mggben@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students Here's the end of the article: One notable early finding, Ms. Phillips said, is that teachers who incessantly drill their students to prepare for standardized tests tend to have lower value-added learning gains than those who simply work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and mathematics. Teachers whose students agreed with the statement, “We spend a lot of time in this class practicing for the state test,” tended to make smaller gains on those exams than other teachers. “Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests,” Ms. Phillips said. “It turns out all that ‘drill and kill’ isn’t helpful.” Michele Margie wrote: > What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students > The New York Times / International Herald Tribune > December 10, 2010 > > How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers? > > Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from > a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of > distinguishing good teachers from bad. > > Teachers whose students described them as skillful at maintaining > classroom order, at focusing their instruction and at helping their > charges learn from their mistakes are often the same teachers whose > students learn the most in the course of a year, as measured by gains > on standardized test scores, according to a progress report on the > research. > > (To read the whole article, go to - > http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html?_r=1&ref=sam_dillon ----------------------------------------------- ** Etni homepage - http://www.etni.org ** for help - ask@xxxxxxxx ** ** to post to this list - etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** -----------------------------------------------