Studies of Teacher Behavior

Abstract

THIS REPORT summarizes the major studies I of the Harvard Teacher Education Research Pro ject. In 1953, preliminary plans for the project were outlined by one of the writers (6). Some remarks may be made here about the history of the project and a review of its phil osophy. The project was begun in 1952 when a committee of the faculty of the Harvard Grad uate School of Education met regularly to dis cuss research approaches for evaluatingthe fifth programs at the School. 1? The committee decided not only to investigate the re sults of this institution's training but also to study more general aspects of teacher behavior. Therefore, researches were started that in volved not only the student-teachers but also ex perienced, practicing teachers. One of our objectives has been to predict atti tudes and behavior at a given point in the teach er's career from a knowledge of her attitudes and behavior at a preceding time. For instance, we have studied the relationships between a pre graduate school group of variables ( undergradu ate major, childhood residence, etc.,) and ini tial graduate school variables (interest in teach ing, attitudes toward children, etc.); then be tween graduate school experiences and charac teristics of the first year of full-time teaching (obtained from a follow-up questionnaire), etc. Also, we ?have been interested in studying teach ers at a given time in their careers, e. g., the relationships between certain teacher behaviors in the classroom and the performance of the pu pils in t?hat classroom. Our general philosophy has been that in such step-wise fashion we could achieve useful in sights into the antecedents of given kinds of teachI er behavior in the classroom and their conse quences. To say that a teacher should be warm and friendly toward pupils gains added import ance when it is demonstrated that such tea cher behavior has particular kinds of effects on the performance of the students in his classroom. Likewise, it is useful to select teachers by means of an attitude scale only if it is known that such attitudes are related to classroom teaching be havior, and, in turn, to pupil performance. Before the studies here reported could be car ried out, substantial effort was spent on develop ing measuring instruments. In this phase, re search involving experienced teachers as well as teacher trainees was undertaken. The feasibility of rating teacher behavior by means of student reports was developed and the relationships o f such beliefs to classroom behavior explored. A variety of devices to obtain relevant information from incoming and resident teacher training stu dents was devised and tried. Among these were questionnaires and tests to measure personal in volvement in education as a career, which turned out to be of first importance in predicting later withdrawal from teaching. Also, an efficient ques tionnaire for obtaining a variety of information about the graduate's teaching experiences and fu ture plans was successfully used. We were intrigued to find that investigating one area of educational importance?the evalua tion of teaching effectiveness?had ramifications for other educational problems. For examp 1 e, in order to test one of our hypotheses, we f i r st had to perform an experiment on teaching meth ods, which provided important information about methods for teaching problem solving. Though we are optimistic about the v a 1 ue of