Author Description

This monograph updates a 1978 publication titled "The Scientific Basis of the Art of Teaching." Based on lectures presented during the 1983-84 academic year, this work discusses research on teaching to provide a substantial scientific basis for the art of teaching and for the education of teachers in that art. For several decades, one research reviewer after another concluded that relationships between teaching practices and educational outcomes were not evident. The negative consensus was largely due to a simple but widespread fallacy: the fallacy of taking seriously the statistical significance of statistically weak single studies. Recent meta-analysis has improved the procedures for drawing conclusions from any set of studies of relationships between roughly similar variables. Divided into three chapters, this book: (1) reviews the research gains made evident through meta-analysis; (2) discusses the application of these gains for the improvement of teaching practices and teacher education; and (3) considers the process-product, ethnographic-sociolinguistic, and other paradigms for research on teaching to improve these gains. Six pages of references conclude the document. (PN)