Overall, across these 13 items, teachers of elementary grades are somewhat more constructivist in philosophy than other teachers are (particularly those who teach self-contained classes), and high school teachers are somewhat less constructivist than other teachers.  By subject matter, two groups of secondary teachers have more constructivist philosophies than do others: English teachers and a relatively small group of primarily middle-grades teachers who teach a variety of academic subjects.  (See Table 5.)  Three groups of secondary teachers are generally less constructivist than are others: social studies teachers, math teachers, and foreign language teachers. Teachers of those subjects more often agree with the "traditional" transmission-oriented views of instruction.  (Secondary science teachers tend to be squarely in the middle.)  Among non-academic or "applied" subjects, computer teachers had views slightly on the constructivist side, while the business education and fine arts teachers in our national sample are clearly transmission-oriented in their beliefs.

Table 5: Average Teacher Belief Index z-Scores by Subject and Level

Although, on average, middle school teachers have slightly more constructivist beliefs than high school teachers do, the patterns are quite different for different subjects.  For some subjects, notably those of the more qualitative sort, high school teachers are more constructivist.  For example, it is primarily high school English teachers, not middle school, who hold strongly constructivist beliefs—among the strongest of any group in our sample.  Furthermore, in several of the subjects where transmission-oriented views predominate—social studies, foreign language, and fine arts—it is at the middle school level where transmission-oriented views are particularly strong; high school teachers of those subjects are much closer to the middle of the teaching philosophy distribution.  On the other hand, in the more technical and quantitative subjects of science, mathematics, and computer education, middle school teachers are more inquiry-oriented (constructivist) than their high school teacher peers.  In fact, high school math teachers are more transmission-oriented than any other group of high school teachers in our national sample.

How would we account for these different patterns of belief by teachers in different subjects, and why do such contrasting patterns prevail between middle and high school teachers in different subjects?  To explain subject-matter differences, and to some extent differences in level as well, one has to consider the nature of the curriculum in the different subjects.  In areas (subjects and levels) where the most salient competencies are conceptual ones, teachers are more apt to see student learning as arising from engagement in issues in which the student has a personal interest.  Conceptual learning seems to demand an approach that facilitates the emergence of student understanding from their continued intellectual engagement with the subject.   Conversely, in areas where the most salient competencies are defined as involving procedural and factual knowledge, teachers may be more inclined towards direct explanation and an emphasis on "clear, correct answers."  Of course every field of study could be approached from either a conceptual or procedural direction.  However, every field has a characteristically normative set of beliefs about the appropriate timing of attention to procedural knowledge and conceptual understanding.  Differences in teaching philosophies across fields, and across levels within fields, may largely come from parallel differences in those curriculum-based beliefs.

In addition, differences in philosophies within a subject between middle grade and high school teachers may also be due to other factors that operate differentially across subjects.  Older students' more developed abilities to reason independently and critically about complex issues might lead high school teachers to believe more in the kind of teaching that provides latitude to students; however, such views are likely to prevail only in those subject areas where reasoning is valued relative to skills or knowledge acquisition.  On the other hand, high school teachers of some subjects may feel a greater sense of ownership in the knowledge base that exists in their field (or a greater sense of pressure to prepare their students for college admission), and may therefore feel a greater desire to directly convey that knowledge base to their students.  Overall, then, the specific strength of these forces—internal or external pressure to cover curriculum versus expectations for more independent thinking by students—may explain why for some subjects, teachers' philosophies appear to be more constructivist among middle grades teachers while for other subjects, more constructivist philosophies prevail among high school teachers.

We will return to these issues later in this report, after we examine in detail specific instructional practices of teachers of different subjects, and the extent to which those classroom practices reflect a constructivist or a transmission-oriented pedagogy.   However, before discussing teachers' practices, we need to examine one other area regarding teachers' beliefs—their judgments about the usefulness of different forms of assessment in deciding how well students are learning.

Beliefs about Methods of Assessing Student Learning

Teachers choose from an array of methods to evaluate their students' acquisition of competencies and knowledge.  These methods range from brief self-constructed short-answer quizzes and externally designed (i.e., "standardized") multiple-choice tests all the way to small group and individual research projects several weeks in the making.   A teacher's choice of assessment methods is one way in which she implements a teaching philosophy, and constitutes one element of her actual classroom practice.  However, rather than asking teachers about their actual assessment practices, the TLC survey asked teachers to evaluate the usefulness of different methods of assessing student learning.  Those judgments constitute another aspect of teaching philosophy.

Given the widespread use in schools of short-answer and multiple-choice tests (including those provided to teachers by textbook publishers), and given the widespread discussion in the policy community about the use of externally designed standardized multiple-choice tests for accountability purposes, it is important to note that most teachers do not find those approaches as "useful…in judging how well students are learning" as others in their repertoire. Overall, among the six assessment methods the teachers were asked to rate in terms of usefulness for themselves, the three judged most useful were student presentations and performances, individual and group projects, and open-ended problems.  By far the least useful method, in the view of teachers, was standardized test results, and the next least useful was "short-answer and multiple-choice tests."  In fact, in not a single academic subject did teachers say that standardized tests, short answer, or multiple choice assessments were among the most useful assessments available to them. In every subject, project work, student performances, and open-ended problems were viewed as being more useful than either short-answer/multiple-choice tests or standardized test results. (See Table 6.)

Table 6:  Percent of teachers reporting each kind of assessment

. As one would expect, there is an association between valuing student presentations, projects, and open-ended problem-solving and constructivist teaching philosophies; and, conversely, valuing short-answer/multiple choice tests and standardized tests and a transmission-oriented philosophy.  (See Table 7.)

Table 7: Correlations between Belief Index and Usefulness
of Different Kinds of Assessment

.

These findings suggest that, as a group and in every subject, a large majority of teachers believe that if the purpose of assessing students is to find out how well students are learning, then assessment should be based on providing students with opportunities to demonstrate and communicate their understandings and ability to solve problems rather than on the basis of seeing which answers they select from a list or what factual information they can recall.  This result reinforces the position that teachers have primarily constructivist viewpoints about teaching and learning.

Critics of standardized testing and advocates of alternative assessment strategies should be encouraged by these findings.  They illustrate that, to a large extent, teachers also question the utility not only of standardized tests, but even the short-answer and multiple-choice style tests that textbook publishers provide to them and that they create themselves, constrained by limited time and the need to have some measurement on the 150 students they teach.  For people who are concerned about testing policies and that element of the "reform" movement based on the idea of keeping teachers and students accountable through standardized test comparisons, it is important to recognize that teachers themselves seem to be fairly cognizant of the limitations of the kind of testing practices that such an accountability system would promulgate.

Part II. Constructivist-Compatible Teaching Practices

Teaching Practices and Teaching Philosophy

In the previous section, we examined a number of beliefs about teaching and learning that together reflect a philosophy, which we argue, is compatible with constructivist learning theory.  However, carrying out a teaching practice based totally on such beliefs is anything but easy to accomplish.  Even when teachers have constructivist beliefs, limitations coming from (a) the strain of being responsible for entire classrooms of individual students at the same time, (b) inadequacies in their own knowledge of content or pedagogy, (c) competing objectives that they may have themselves, or (d) external pressures on what they must do in the classroom—all of these forces interfere with the implementation of a constructivist philosophy. What is implemented, based on what is relatively easy to implement and what draws less interference from competing forces, often bears only a superficial resemblance to the philosophy that a teacher may espouse.  

For example, a fairly consistent theme in the literature on school improvement is the notion that broad coverage of a large number of topics does not permit students to engage a given issue deeply enough to generate a web of connected and meaningful understandings.  If constructivist-believing teachers have other objectives that include, for example, broad coverage of diverse content (whether personally valued or because of outside pressures), then those teachers will inevitably fail to be as constructivist in practice as in philosophy.  In fact, one question in the survey asked teachers to characterize the number of topics (themes, units, chapters) that they cover in one class—the class in which they actually feel they most often achieve their teaching objectives.  Only 7% of teachers surveyed reported covering a small number of topics in great depth in that class, while one-half (actually, at least 50% in every subject) reported covering a large or very large number of topics without going into very much depth.

Constructivist-Compatible Teaching Practices

The central element of constructivist learning theory is that learning occurs when a student is deeply engaged with an intellectual issue.  According to this theory, learning occurs only when students make an effort to construct their own understanding out of a problem situation.  Moreover, student effort occurs primarily around learning tasks that students regard as meaningful. That is, although teachers can get students to do schoolwork by using various sanctions and incentives, constructivism maintains that deep understanding only occurs if students are motivated by a desire to understand and that that motivation is much more likely if (a) she already has an interest in and some knowledge of the content and (b) if the content is made "accessible" to the student by somehow making explicit connections to the student's current perspective or understandings. Teaching that organizes student work around meaningful activities so that students are thoughtfully engaged with content is the heart of a constructivist teaching practice. 

Thoughtful engagement with content would be expected, for example, if students are required to monitor their own learning experience as part of their class work.  Examples of meaningful self-monitoring would include writing about their own work, considering multiple potentially valid alternatives, helping to plan classroom activities, designing their own problems to solve, or undertaking tasks where there is not a clear "correct" answer ahead of time.  Other examples of teaching practices which suggest that students are thoughtfully engaged in intellectual work include frequent writing assignments of a reflective nature, having students make conjectures to explain things and backing up those conjectures with reasoning and evidence, and expressing the same idea in multiple forms. These are among the operational indicators we use to define a constructivist-compatible teaching practice.

Other teaching practices are also compatible with constructivism but do not appear to be inevitably associated with a constructivist philosophy—practices such as having students work in groups, do laboratory activities, or work on complex projects on a single topic. That is, we do not automatically conclude that teachers' use of these practices means that their principal intent is that students be thoughtfully engaged with content in the same way that we are willing to assume that thoughtful engagement is the goal of reflective writing assignments or asking students to make conjectures.  Projects and small group work can be assigned without attention to deep intellectual engagement; they are activities that teachers can, to some extent, be expected to report whether or not they are particularly constructivist.   In sum, they may be assigned and carried out without being intellectually challenging.

The question of the intellectual engagement occurring in these common "constructivist-compatible" activities is therefore important to address.  In what settings do projects and group-work provide a vehicle for meaningful student engagement?

Thus, although our study describes a variety of teaching practices associated with a constructivist-compatible teaching practice, we define certain practices—the ones most directly linked with student intellectual engagement (meaningful thinking)—as central, while other practices—notably the use of projects and group activities—we define as probabilistically indicative of a constructivist practice. The following section discusses 27 teaching practices—how they are conceptualized, how they are related to one another, and how they are distributed across school levels and subjects.  The section is divided into five main groups of survey items: (1) indicators of "meaningful thinking" teaching practices including reflective writing; (2) indicators of "problem-solving"; (3) indicators of teaching using "group-work"; (4) indicators of a "project-based" approach to teaching; and (5) indicators of a traditional, transmission- and skills-oriented teaching practice.

Each indicator (survey item) is uniquely assigned [4] to one of these categories, based on a large number of exploratory factor analytic investigations.[5]  We find that our particular categorization of the 27 indicators is useful and defensible statistically, but we make no claim that this typology and our assignment of survey items has more than heuristic value. Figure 3 lists each of the 27 survey items discussed in this section, according to the category to which we assigned it. Appendix D presents the distribution of responses by teachers in the national probability sample to each of the items in the five survey questions that were used to develop the dimensions of teaching practice examined and the overall Constructivist Pedagogy Index.

One other point. When we compare teachers of different subjects on these indices of instructional practice, as we do below, we sometimes find substantial differences in the average scores of teachers in different subjects.  Although we are aware that specific instructional practices are differentially relevant to the teaching of different subjects, we believe that, for the most part, differences across teaching subjects in average index scores reflect real differences in the constructivism of teaching practices experienced by students in classes in these subjects.  At the same time, differences in mean scores by subject may also reflect the particular survey items selected to measure each aspect of instructional practice.  Without further investigation, it is difficult to know which of these two explanations is more appropriate for any given comparison. Consequently, as a conservative approach, in this report we pay more attention to differences among teachers of the same subject than to the overall differences among teachers across all subjects. 

Figure 3: Survey Items Measuring Constructivist Practice

 previous page                    next page