FOOTNOTES

1 See Glazer, (1999) for an historical discussion of these issues.

 

2 The probability sample was a weighted sample with selection probabilities related to school size and the amount of computer technology present. Selection of the additional "purposive" sample schools was based upon extensive data gathering, including tabulation of schools participating in more than 50 reform programs and development of a "technology presence index" for all public schools in the United States, using data from Quality Education Data, Inc.

 

3 Again, weights were used that were inversely proportional to selection probabilities of different teachers. [Further information about the sampling design can be found at http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC. Principals and school technology coordinators also supplied information for the study.

 

4 Teachers are weighted inversely to their probability of selection within their school, and for the probability sample, schools themselves are weighted inversely to their probability of selection.

 

5 As part of the effort to limit response burden, each teacher was asked to respond to only seven of 12 statements. Indices were built by inserting sample mean values for the other five statements.

 

6 These items included: direct instruction, close monitoring of student work, giving students rewards for doing well, use of textbooks generally, and having students answer questions from textbooks.

 

7 These included multiple activities occurring simultaneously during class, student interest governing lesson topics, evaluating student products rather than tests, allowing themselves to be "taught" by students, having students teach one another, student self-directed topic exploration, students revising their prior work, having students make and investigate their own predictions, long projects, group work, and writing long essays.

 

8 For more detailed information on teachers' responses with respect to teacher philosophy and practice see Ravitz & Becker, (1999).

 

9 The first item contrasted the role of the teacher as learning facilitator in inquiry-based learning versus transmitter of information and procedural directions. A second item contrasted the primacy of "sense-making" with importance of transmitting the required curriculum.  A third item presented the choice between believing that motivation and student interest were more important than specific subject-matter versus believing that the textbook content in history, science, math, and language skills should "drive what students study."  A fourth item contrasted a teaching style with multiple activities incorporating the integration of diverse skills occurring simultaneously in the classroom with a whole-class model with short time-span tasks that "match students' attention spans and the daily class schedule."

 

10 The effects of comingling the specialized samples with the national probability sample are quite small.  For example, the correlation Within-School Teacher Interaction and Teacher Pedagogy is .26 for the probability sample alone and .30 when combining that sample with the remaining teachers studied. 

 

11 Had all associations with Pedagogical Change been low, an alternative explanation of unreliable measurement would have been plausible. However, other correlations with this variable are higher, as the text below shows.

 

12 These three criteria are averaging half-way between "several per month" and "1-3 times per week" on the within-school interaction items; meeting at least two criteria for external contacts with teachers; and participating in at least three of the six types of professional activities.

 

13 These three criteria are interacting with other teachers, on average, "several times per month" across the six within-school interaction items; meeting one of the three criteria for external contacts; and participating in two or more types of leadership activities.

 

14 Only 50% of the teachers were asked to complete the questions about changes in pedagogy over the previous three years.

 

15 Deep Thinking included items about self-assessment of work, explaining reasoning in writing, writing in a journal, debating, working on tasks with no clear answer, multiple representations of issues, introducing a unit by having students make conjectures, and introducing a unit by having students discuss the topic in small groups. Project-Based Activities involved student work on weeklong projects, making products used by someone else, doing hands-on activities, demonstrating their work before an audience, and (negatively) doing seatwork.

 

16 Note that philosophy is not controlled.  In the earlier discussion of a teacher's role orientation, it was plausible that philosophy could affect a teacher's role orientation and therefore render an association between role orientation and pedagogy spurious.  However, it is more likely that a teacher's work environment would affect their philosophy than vice versa.  So controlling on philosophy would not be appropriate except to explain the mechanism through which work environment affects pedagogy.

 

17 Our investigation of the impact of school culture was limited, though, by measurement issues related to the limited sampling of individual representative teachers at each school and the use of different subsamples of survey questions for different respondents.

 

18 On the other hand, frequency of within-school collaborative practice did not appear to be linked to recent changes towards a more constructivist approach.  One way to understand this is that teachers who engage in this form of interaction have done so for many years and therefore have developed beliefs and educational practices that are consistent with this level of exchange.
        In fact, the data suggests that for those teachers who have recently shifted towards a knowledge-building or inquiry approach to teaching in their classroom, the motivation for this change may frequently come from beyond the school community. The substantial correlation between interaction with teachers from other schools and recent shifts toward more constructivist teaching confirms this possibility.