Designs for improving student learning: Investigating instructional regimes.

For most of this century, policymakers have attempted to improve student learning by focusing on altering aspects of the environments of schools, such as increasing funding, integrating classrooms, requiring more demanding teacher credentialing, or inserting specific experts, like coaches or social workers, into schools. This pattern of activity has had fairly consistent consequences; policy after policy has yet to stimulate a resource in the environment that consistently and systematically increases student achievement. The mismatch between the intent of policy to affect teaching and student learning, and the actual effect of policy may be the result of lack of knowledge about what goes on in classrooms. If educational leaders and policymakers do not know enough about the complex work of teaching, then acting to improve teaching and learning is likely to come up short in its goal. One way to consider the work of teaching is to frame it as patterns of actions of teachers and students around specific content. This pattern of action could be called an instructional regime, meaning the dynamic and interactive work of teaching and learning. The instructional regime, then, is a causal agent in student learning and essential to understand when designing policies to improve student achievement. This thesis is an attempt to probe data on instruction to more fully understand whether instructional regimes occur naturally in classrooms, and whether the various regimes have different effects on achievement. The study uses Item Response Theory and Hierarchical Linear Modeling to analyze quantitative data about instruction from 119 high-poverty schools across the nation. The teaching regimes discerned through the quantitative data are then more fully explored through an analysis of observational data taken from a subset of schools nested within the larger dataset. The data allow for a unique study of the relationship between instruction in writing and reading, and the effect on reading comprehension. It will suggest that several structural regimes have an effect on improving reading achievement among disadvantaged fourth-graders. Although this is an exploratory study, such research has implications for both policymakers and educators who make decisions about how instruction is enacted in classrooms.Ph.D.Curriculum developmentEducationEducational administrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127050/2/3328808.pd