Another survey question asked teachers about an instructional practice similar in many ways to weeklong projects: the use of "hands-on or laboratory" activities.  Like projects, hands-on work is meant to give students an opportunity to apply ideas in concrete ways—to make use of knowledge rather than treat it as a set of abstract concepts. Like week-long projects, hands-on work is very common in applied secondary courses (80 to 97% reporting weekly hands-on activity), but are nearly as frequent in science classes (65-70% weekly).  However, the concept of "hands-on" may not have wide understanding in other academic subjects, since at most one one-third of the teachers of other academic subjects (social studies, math, English, and foreign languages) reported giving students even monthly opportunities to engage in hands-on work.

The one notable difference between middle and high school teachers concerns social studies teachers.  Social studies teachers in middle school spend more class time on student project-type activity, both the weeklong projects we asked about in one question and the "hands-on" work from the other question.

In addition to week-long projects and hands-on activity, we also asked about more ambitious, and consequently less common, types of projects—ones that involve students making a product for use by others and ones in which they demonstrate their work to audiences other than their own school or family. Only about 10% of all teachers reported having their selected class do these activities to any extent. (See Table 17.)

Table 17: Percent of Teachers Reporting
Different Types of Project Activities

As with project work in general, it is clearly the case that applied teachers more often have students create products for use by others or demonstrate their work to an outside audience.  Vocational teachers employ these approaches most often, with more than 50% saying their students produced a product for use on a monthly basis and 30% saying their students demonstrated their work before an outside audience. Next to vocational education teachers, products made for use were most often part of computer teachers' practices (36%, monthly), while demonstrations of work to outsiders were most commonly done by students in fine arts classes (28%, monthly). In contrast, fewer than 10% of the secondary academic subject-matter teachers said their students produced products for use (monthly) and only slightly more said their students demonstrated their work before outside audiences. Among the academic teachers, demonstrations were most common among high school English teachers, but even there, only one in seven reported this as part of their practice (14%).

In sum, a far greater proportion of teachers in the applied subjects have students doing project work than in academic classes.  The one exception is in English, where most students are asked to work on projects that take a week or longer; and in science, where most teachers have students do laboratory and other hands-on work on a weekly basis.  Overall, more project-based activities occur in middle school academic classrooms than in high school academic classrooms.  We suspect that high school academic teachers may have more curriculum pressures and lack the curricular flexibility of middle school teachers.

Project Activity and Cognitive Challenge:

All four aspects of project work measured are moderately to highly associated with higher levels of cognitive challenge. Overall, the largest effect size is for students creating products for use by others (E.S.=0.7). [15] However, the other three items' effect sizes were all between 0.5 and 0.6.

The relationship between project use and cognitive challenge varies a great deal by subject.  Business education teachers who are above the median in project use have only slightly higher scores on cognitive challenge than other business education teachers, suggesting that projects are not particularly a vehicle for raising the intellectual level of subject-matter content in business courses.  On the other hand, among English, science, middle school math, and elementary teachers, those who do more projects are close to if not a full standard deviation higher on use of cognitively challenging strategies than teachers in the same subjects who are less active in the use of student projects. [16]  In these subjects, projects indeed may be an important mechanism whereby cognitively-oriented teachers enable students to have a more meaningful learning experience.

The cognitive challenge of particular types of project activities (e.g., demonstrations, making useful products, etc.) appears to vary subject-by-subject. Foreign language teachers' use of language labs and high school math teachers' use of hands-on activities seems not to be related to cognitive challenge whereas for other academic subjects and even for middle school math, the teachers who give students projects and hands-on activities to work on do report greater use of cognitively challenging teaching strategies. (See Table 18.)

Table 18: Effect size of project activity on Cognitive challenge

Comparing and Combining Projects and Group Work:

We examined the co-incidence of projects, group work, and activities involving cognitive challenge and found that, indeed, within every subject, the teachers who are most actively engaged in both project and group work in their classes provide substantially more activities associated with cognitive challenge than other teachers do. For example, compared to the average high school English teacher, teachers who are above-average in both the use of projects and group work have average z-scores that put them into the 82^nd   percentile (among high school English teachers) on assigning cognitive challenging tasks to their students.  Similar results were found for every academic subject and for computer education teachers as well.  In contrast, teachers who are below-average on use of both projects and group work also are far below average on assigning cognitively challenging tasks. (See Table 19.)

The effect sizes of both group work and projects on cognitive challenge are substantial (0.9 and 0.8, respectively). For most subjects, projects and group work are about equally associated with cognitive challenge.  However, for mathematics, computer classes, and high school social studies, group work is more associated with high cognitive challenge than project work is.  In those subjects, projects may be fairly superficial while group work may form the basis of serious discourse about understanding the content of the subject.  [17]

Overall, it is the presence of above-average frequency of both projects and group work that most strongly predicts whether a teacher provides high cognitive challenge, according to our measure.  Generally, the effects of the two components are additive—a teacher who is above-average on either projects or group work employs cognitively challenging tasks more than one who is below-average. The large correlations among these three components of constructivist pedagogy, among teachers of the same subject area, suggests that teachers who view learning as a meaning-constructing process will generally be the same teachers who prioritize conceptual understanding over factual learning and routine skill competencies and will tend to incorporate all three pedagogical practices into their teaching—student projects, students working in groups, and tasks that provide cognitive challenge.

Table 19:  Within-Subject Cognitive Challenge Scores,
 by Teachers Scoring Above or Below the Mean of
 same-subject teachers on Projects and Group Work

Traditional Instruction: Prevalence and Cognitive Challenge

The final set of survey items dealing with teacher pedagogy that we examined are a set of measures of fairly common teaching practices that are generally associated with a skills-practice and knowledge-transmission orientation rather than with constructivist pedagogical beliefs and practices. These include frequency of teacher-led whole-class discussions, individual seatwork ("answering questions in the textbook or worksheets"), asking questions in order to test students' knowledge of the correct answer, and having students do introductory drills to introduce them to a new unit. 

Do these traditional activities represent an independent aspect of a teacher's overall repertoire, one that most teachers can be expected to follow regardless of how much they use projects and group work or whether or not they emphasize cognitively challenging strategies?  Or do they represent an alternative view of instruction that occurs mainly among teachers who do not employ the constructivist-compatible practices that we have already discussed?

We briefly present the prevalence of the specific skills- and transmission-oriented practices in our survey, and then show the relationship between these practices and the use of projects, group work, and cognitive challenge, both between subjects and within subjects.

Of the transmission-oriented activities we asked about, one very common practice involves the use of textbooks and worksheets. Two-thirds of all teachers report assigning worksheets or textbook exercises to students  in their selected class.  Nearly as many (64%) often introduce a new unit to students by having them do introductory drills on related skills or facts. A majority of teachers "very often" or "always" ask students questions in order to check that students know the "correct" answer.  And most teachers spend some time in whole-class discussion mode, asking students a series of inter-related questions, though only one third did so for more than one hour in the last five. Table 20 shows the percentage of teachers by subject and level who reported using these practices frequently.  However, the z-score index in the last column of the table is based on how infrequently these practices are used; thus it represents "infrequent use of traditional practices."

Table 20: Use of TRADITIONAL practices by subject and Level taught  (PERCENT)

The classes where these transmission-oriented practices are least frequent are high school English, computer classes, vocational education, fine arts, and middle school science.  Interestingly, all five of those classes have the highest mean scores on one of the components of constructivist practice already discussed:  High school English classes are highest on cognitive challenge; fine arts, vocational education, and computer classes have the three highest mean scores on projects; and middle school science teachers use group work more than any other category of teacher. In contrast, the subjects where knowledge-transmission- and skills-oriented practices are most common are the same subjects where the previously identified components of constructivist practice are least common— mathematics (lowest in the use of projects), business education (lowest in both cognitive challenge and group work), and foreign language (among the lowest in cognitive challenge and low on projects as well). (See Table 21, which shows the rank-order of each of 15 groups of teachers on all of the measures of constructivist teaching practice, including "infrequent use of traditional practices" which we are discussing here.) [18]

These findings strongly suggest that how frequently teachers of a given subject use skills-practice and transmission activities is inversely related to how frequently teachers of that subject follow a constructivist teaching practice. [19]

TABLE 21: RANKING OF SUBJECTS/LEVELS
BY EACH COMPONENT OF CONSTRUCTIVIST TEACHING PRACTICE

The previous conclusion concerned comparisons of teachers in different subjects—i.e., subjects whose teachers reported infrequent use of traditional practices were the same subjects where teachers reported frequent use of cognitively challenging practices.  However, the question remains about the pattern within each subject: In any given subject, are the teachers who most infrequently use transmission and skills-practice activities the same teachers who most frequently employ practices that emphasize cognitive challenge? (And vice versa—do the heavily traditional teachers score lowest on Cognitive Challenge?) [20]

The answer is that academic teachers who reported the least frequent use of traditional transmission and skills-practice activities scored somewhat higher on the Cognitive Challenge Index (and vice versa).  However, the pattern is not uniform across all academic subjects nor is it true for the applied secondary subjects. The strongest patterns (with effect sizes of 0.5 or higher) are for foreign language teachers, middle school math and English teachers, and high school English teachers.  In those subjects, the teachers who frequently use transmission and skills-practice activities are the least likely to have high Cognitive Challenge scores.  However, in other academic subjects—science, high school social studies, and high school math—the relationships, although positive, are smaller. [21] In other words, it may be more possible for direct instruction approaches and cognitive challenge to co-exist in those particular subjects and levels. And in the applied subjects, there is either no relationship (as among fine arts, vocational education, and computer teachers) or even the opposite one (among business teachers). That is, for business education teachers, those who most frequently report using traditional skills-practice activities also are the ones who most frequently report using cognitively challenging ones (see Table 22). [22]

Table 22:  effect size of the avoidance (infrequency)
 of TRADITIONAL practices on Cognitive challenge

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