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This chapter examines research on professional development, or PD, focusing specifically on underlying assumptions about the nature of teaching and the nature of teacher learning. It examines PD programs according to their assumptions about what teachers need to learn, and it examines PD studies according to how and when they expect to see evidence of teacher learning. The chapter seeks to provide a broad view of how we think about teaching and teacher learning and to examine our underlying assumptions both about teaching and about how PD is expected to improve teaching. With respect to program effectiveness, the chapter raises questions about the extent to which effective PD programs can be replicated; with respect to our study designs, it raises questions about how teacher learning occurs and when and how we should expect to see program effects on teachers’ practices. The chapter also offers some suggestions for future research design.

Professional development programs are based on different theories of how students learn and different theories of how teachers learn. Reviewers often sort programs according to design features such as program duration, intensity, or the use of specific techniques such as coaches or online lessons, but these categories do not illuminate the programs’ underlying purpose or premises about teaching and teacher learning. This review sorts programs according to their underlying theories of action, which include (a) a main idea that teachers should learn and (b) a strategy for helping teachers enact that idea within their own ongoing systems of practice. Using rigorous research design standards, the review identifies 28 studies. Because studies differ in multiple ways, the review presents program effects graphically rather than statistically. Visual patterns suggest that many popular design features are not associated with program effectiveness. Furthermore, different main ideas are not differentially effective. However, the pedagogies used to facilitate enactment differ in their effectiveness. Finally, the review addresses the question of research design for studies of professional development and suggests that some widely favored research designs might adversely affect study outcomes.

Teacher education programs typically teach novices about one part of teaching at a time. We might offer courses on different topics—cultural foundations, learning theory, or classroom management—or we may parse teaching practice itself into a set of discrete techniques, such as core teaching practices, that can be taught individually. Missing from our courses is attention to the ultimate purpose of these discrete parts—how specific concepts can help teachers achieve their goals, or how specific procedures can help them achieve their goals. Because we are now shifting from a focus on bodies of knowledge to a focus on depictions of practice, this article examines our efforts to parse teaching practice into lists of discrete procedures. It argues that we need to pay less attention to the visible behaviors of teaching and more attention to the purposes that are served by those behaviors. As a way to begin a conversation about parsing teachers’ purposes, I offer a proposal for conceptualizing teaching as a practice that entails five persistent problems, each of which presents a difficult challenge to teachers, and all of which compete for teachers’ attention. Viewed in this way, the role of teacher education is not to offer solutions to these problems, but instead to help novices learn to analyze these problems and to evaluate alternative courses of action for how well they address these problems.

Based on an analysis of occupational competence in teaching and teacher education, this article draws together a set of dilemmas that face the field, arguing that an occupational analysis is needed to complement the more common institutional analysis of teacher education. Then, this analysis is used to evaluate the prospects of the reforms that currently are dominant in the policy discourse of teacher education. The article concludes with thoughts on some promising directions for the improvement of the field of teacher education.

Social psychologists are persuaded that researchers as well as laymen tend to overestimate the influence of personal traits and underestimate the influence of situations on observed behavior. The author of this article suggests that education researchers and policy makers may be overestimating the role of personal qualities in their quest to understand teaching quality. In their effort to understand classroom-to-classroom differences in student learning, they may focus too much on the characteristics of teachers themselves, overlooking situational factors that may have a strong bearing on the quality of the teaching practices we see. The author reviews some of these situational forces.

This special issue, “Bold Ideas for a New Era in Teacher Education, Teacher Preparation, and Teacher Practice,” seeks to examine the impact of bold ideas on our field. Authors were asked to propose particular bold ideas that they wanted to examine. I proposed to examine the concept of bold ideas itself. In this article, I challenge the notion that boldness is an inherently good thing. I am not arguing against any of the particular examples of bold ideas offered in this special issue, rather I argue against the pursuit of boldness per se.

The influence of teachers’ qualifications on their teaching practice has been subject to debate. Literature reviews do not settle these debates, partly because the literature is uneven and partly because reviews capture only narrow slices of literature. In particular, many reviews eliminate qualitative studies. Yet without examining qualitative evidence, variations in quantitative findings are difficult to interpret, disappointing findings are difficult to understand, and plausible explanations of patterns are in short supply. The present review focuses on qualitative studies and compares their findings with those from quantitative literature. The author finds that the qualitative literature agrees with quantitative literature in its inability to distinguish between teachers with different types of certificates or different teacher education backgrounds. On the other side, the author finds more evidence of benefit from content knowledge than quantitative studies have typically found. The qualitative studies also reveal competing influences and offer hypotheses about why the outcomes look the way they do.

TEACHER quality has become a hot topic. Everyone wants to measure it, reward it, or improve it. One reason for this interest is that we now have evidence that teachers differ dramatically in their ability to raise student test scores. We don't know why some teachers are better than others, so we say the differences are due to "teacher quality." Another reason for our current interest in teacher quality is that recent No Child Left Behind requirements focus on highly qualified teachers, so we tend to think about indicators of "teacher quality." Yet another reason for this interest is that advocates for equity often seek to ensure that schools serving lower-income students provide the same quality of teachers as those serving more advantaged students. The problem is that teacher quality has become such a ubiquitous term that it lacks a clear meaning. As researchers and policy analysts enter into debates about teacher quality, they often use the phrase to refer to very different things. For example, people interested in recruitment tend to use the phrase "teacher quality" to refer to tested ability. (1) These writers want us to design recruitment practices that entice people with higher test scores to become teachers. For them, test scores are an indicator of teacher quality. Meanwhile, people interested in the equitable distribution of teachers across student populations often use the phrase "teacher quality" to refer to credentials. (2) These writers want to ensure that all students have access to teachers who have obtained comparable licenses and certificates. For them, certificates and teaching experience are indicators of teacher quality. Still other people use the phrase "teacher quality" to refer to the quality of teachers' classroom practices. (3) These writers want to improve the work teachers do inside their classrooms, when actually teaching students. For them, specific teaching practices are indicators of teacher quality. Then there are people who think about school finance and who seek the most productive use of expenditures. (4) They often use the phrase "teacher quality" to refer to teachers' effectiveness in raising student achievement. For them, gains in student achievement are indicators of teacher quality. And, of course, there are people who want teachers to subscribe to particular beliefs and values. In their minds, such values are the chief indicators of teacher quality. These are not the only definitions available, nor are these indicators--test scores, certificates, and so forth--the only available indicators of teacher quality. Such variations in meanings should not be a surprise, for there are indeed numerous dimensions to teacher quality, each of which may be important for different reasons to different people. But unless we can become more precise in our use of the term, we will not improve our ability to measure it, improve it, or reward it. True understanding of teacher quality requires us to recognize that these many facets are distinct, not always overlapping, and not always related to one another. Moreover, we aren't even sure how they influence and interact with one another when they do. A TAXONOMY OF QUALITIES Recognizing all these aspects of teacher quality means that we need to start talking about teacher qualities, rather than "teacher quality." This slight change in language reminds us that there are many different dimensions of teacher quality and if we want to improve the broad, general quality of the American teacher work force, we need to be able to sort out all the specific qualities that are part of it. More important, we need to understand how these different qualities are related to one another and how they complement, contradict, or influence one another. For example, do teachers' own higher test scores actually lead to different or better classroom practices? Do the practices defined in national curriculum frameworks actually yield better student achievement? …

As scholars and their audiences pursue standards of evidence, standards for literature reviews have also become salient. Many authors advocate “systematic” reviews and articulate standards for these. This article compares the bodies of literature derived from systematic and other types of review, which the author labels conceptual, and examines problems associated with different approaches to defining a body of literature. These problems include (a) defining the boundaries of the literature, (b) distinguishing studies from citations, (c) distinguishing literature from lore, (d) deciding which reporting venues to include, and (e) weeding out anomalous studies. The article demonstrates that although systematic reviews may remove some biases through their inclusion rules, they may introduce other biases through their exclusion decisions and may thwart conceptual advances in a field.

Background: Recently, we developed and validated a model to calculate risk-standardized survival rates (RSSRs) for in-hospital cardiac arrest_a common condition occurring within hospitals. Although RSSRs can be used to determine high and low performing sites, it remains unclear if RSSRs for in-hospital cardiac arrest are stable, i.e., similar from year to year. Methods: Within the Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation registry, we identified 21,947 patients from 240 hospitals admitted between 2012 and 2013 with an in-hospital cardiac arrest. Using hierarchical logistic regression, we separately calculated 2012 and 2013 risk-standardized RSSRs for hospitals with at least 10 cardiac arrest cases and evaluated the correlation between 2012 and 2013 RSSRs. Results: The mean hospital RSSR was 23% + 4% (median, 23% [IQR: 21%-25%]) in 2012 and 25% + 5% (median, 25% [IQR: 22%-27%]) in 2013. There was strong correlation between a hospital’s performance between the two years (r=0.50; P Figure ). Most hospitals with RSSRs in the top quintile in 2012 (64.2% [34/53]) remained in the top 2 quintiles in 2013, and only 13.2% (7/53) had RSSRs below the median in 2013. Conversely, most hospitals with RSSRs in the lowest quintile in 2012 (60.4% [29/48]) remained in the lowest 2 quintiles in 2013, and only 22.9% (11/48) had RSSRs above the median in 2013. Conclusion: There was good correlation in RSSRs for in-hospital cardiac arrest for 2012 and 2013. Most top performing hospitals continued to excel and most low performing hospitals continued with below average survival, although some discordance was noted. These findings have implications for identifying top performing hospitals as those that consistently excel in survival outcomes each year.

The author challenges the role of knowledge in teaching by pointing out the variety of issues and concerns teachers must simultaneously address. Teachers use two strategies to manage their multidimensional space: They develop integrated habits and rules of thumb for handling situations as they arise, and they plan their lessons by envisioning them unfolding as a drama might. It is entirely unclear where or how knowledge enhances teachers’ visions, but it is very clear that visions depend on a strong sense of purpose, direction, and momentum. Most teacher educators try to foster visions in their students, but their interest in vision creates two problems. First, it places them in conflict with their university brethren who expect to see them promulgating knowledge. Second, the particular vision they embrace is too narrowly progressive; it ignores many concerns that teachers try to juggle in their practice and many societal ideals for education as well.

The present paper focuses on a particular kind of knowledge--craft knowledge--in which Huberman was interested. The paper contrasts craft knowledge with two other kinds of knowledge often thought to be useful to teaching: systematic knowledge of the sort that comes from research and is taught in university settings, and prescriptive knowledge of the sort that is often codified in state and local policies. Using a study of 45 teachers' lessons, and interviews regarding these lessons, the present paper examines the role each kind of knowledge appears to play in the improvement of practice.

The paper analyses a case study of learning to teach in light of different proposals for what is entailed in learning to teach, with a particular focus on the role of prior beliefs. Much of the literature on learning to teach focuses on the problem of overcoming prior beliefs which derive from teachers' extensive familiarity with the school culture. This case study examines the problem of learning when the culture is remarkably different. It shows that prior beliefs are still very potent inhibitors to learning, even when the context that formed those beliefs is inappropriate to the teaching context.

Education policy researchers rely on a wide range of outcomes to gauge the influence of policies. Sometimes they use standardized achievement tests, and at other times they use classroom observations, teacher reports, or standardized or open-ended teacher interviews. Often, these different data collection devices are used to draw inferences about the intellectual quality of classroom events and, in turn, the quality of student learning. The purpose of this article is to examine and compare these various outcomes in terms of their potential to inform policymakers about policy influences on student outcomes.

In recent years, educational researchers have become consumed by arguments about the relative merits of different genres of research. Some researchers advocate experiments, others advocate ethnographies, and still others advocate narratives. Many genre advocates refer to teachers to justify their arguments, claiming that teachers need more authoritative knowledge (so we should conduct experiments), more dynamic portraits that reveal multiple truths (so we should write narratives), or more richly detailed accounts (so we should do ethnographies). This study examined a variety of contentions about research genres by asking teachers to read and discuss five examples of research, with each example representing a different research genre. Teachers' responses to these articles did not support any of the common contentions about research genres. I conclude from the study that genre is not the most important determinant of an article's value to teachers and that the genre argument is distracting educational researchers from other, more important research tasks.

This article raises the question of what K-12 teachers need to know to teach mathematics and science well. It begins by examining reform proposals for K-12 science and mathematics teaching with an eye toward defining what good teaching practice consists of. It then examines a wide range of lit- erature to delineate the varieties of knowledge that have been associated with this kind of teaching. While the focus is on subject matter knowledge, the article addressed the character of that knowledge rather than the content of that knowledge. Types of knowledge identified in the literature include conceptual under- standing of the subject, pedagogical content knowledge, beliefs about the nature of work in science and mathematics, attitudes toward these subjects, and actual teaching practices with students. The literature is incomplete with respect to which of these is relatively more or relatively less important. © 1998 John Wi- ley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 249-263, 1998.

This article reviews four hypotheses that have been put forward to account for a perceived lack of connection between research and practice: (a) research needs to be more authoritative, (b) research needs to be more relevant, (c) research needs to be more accessible, and (d) the education system itself is inherently too stable or too unstable and therefore unable to respond coherently to research findings. A brief history of thought within each of these hypotheses is offered, and the place of education researchers in the larger education context is discussed.

Publisher Summary This chapter organizes the literature on the relationship between research and educational practice into three broad categories: the influence of research on policy, the influence of research on teaching practice, and the influence of policy on research. Each of these topics is pertinent to educational administrators and policy makers—the first because these groups have a professional responsibility to formulate policies as carefully and productively as they can, the second because they have an ethical obligation to promote research use as a way to enhance teaching and learning, and the third because many of them also are in positions to influence research itself by establishing policies for the funding of an educational research. Policy makers who aim to sponsor research face difficult decisions when it comes to establishing funding priorities that will be most likely to benefit practitioners, for researchers themselves are of mixed minds about how to proceed. The chapter discusses the number of ways in which the policies may influence a research.

In-house evaluators must develop evaluation procedures that accommodate not only their own professional standards, but also the problem-solving styles of the organizations they serve. This article describes how a small sample of evaluators have adapted their methods to their contexts.

The planning process used for developing an evaluation plan can clarify the questions to be asked, suggest the appropriate methodologies to use, and increase the value and use of the evaluation findings.

Much of the day-to-day work of evaluators and policy analysts consists not of conducting large discrete studies but rather of conducting iterative ad hoc analyses of existing data bases. One such analysis, described here, used a variety of different data bases to estimate probable teacher shortages m math and science. Because all of these data-files on emergency certificates, records of new graduates from colleges ofeducation, and statistics on teacher vacancies-were gathered originally for other purposes, each data source required some analytic adjustments. This article describes the full set of compromises needed in order to use the data and the conclusions eventually drawn from the full array of data.

Researchers often assume that "naturalistic" investigative procedures are naturally valid, that they enable researchers to come closer to the true, natural behavior of their subjects than other procedures allow. But although naturalistic inquiry avoids many of the threats to natural validity that are introduced by artificial devices such as experimental interventions or prestructured data-gathering instruments, it does not avoid all forms of artificiality. One glaring threat to natural validity is the obtrusiveness of the inquiry itself. The very fact of the investigator's presence on the scene and the question he or she asks can heighten participants' self-consciousness about their own activities, particularly those activities that the investigator has expressed an interest in, and may motivate them to alter their testimony and even their behavior from its natural state. Students of measurement obtrusive

T hough Follow Through was originally conceived in 1967 to be a largescale compensatory education program extending Head Start services through third grade, budget problems quickly reduced it to a small program and its goals changed accordingly. Follow Through became known for its Planned Variation of educational approaches, and the hope was that study of these variations would increase knowledge of which kinds of educational programs would have different patterns of effects in various kinds of settings. Nearly twenty different educational models were studied. Each model was implemented in a variety of settings, and children in those settings were exposed to their model from kindergarten through third grade. Though the program and the planned variations are still in place, the study of effects is now completed. The Follow Through study was not a true experiment, or even a well-designed quasi-experiment. For example, school districts were nominated by states to participate in the program, and once accepted, they selected the models they would implement. Only after the school districts had identified the classrooms and children in their districts who would participate in Follow Through were they asked to help identify comparable groups to serve as controls. The study is an experiment in the sense that it systematically varies the treatments, but it is a natural study in the sense that disruptions to the setting were minimized by compromising experimental requirements. Abt Associates, Inc., who were commissioned to analyze third-grade outcomes on some 20,000 children involved in the study as well as their parents and teachers, recently submitted a final report to the Office of Education that stacks nearly six inches high (Abt Associates, Inc., 1977). The results have already been described in newspapers and news magazines as favoring more structured educational approaches. Such a conclusion is important to the educational community, but its validity and generalizability need to be evaluated, since the Follow Through study did not employ strict experimental standards. This paper will present an analysis of the findings from the Follow Through study and evaluate some of their meanings.

Concern over the role and status of evaluation has led to both armchair analysis and formal studies of how evaluations have been used. Because "use" itself happens inside the user's head, and we see only the behaviors that follow, armchair analyses may have as much influence on our thinking about evaluation use as empirical studies have. Armchair analyses, for example, helped us realize that busy administrators might not have the time to read 500-page reports, and that they might be put off by technical jargon. Observations like this may seem like common sense now, but there was a time when most evaluation reports were just that: large, cumbersome, and full of jargon.

have been gradually developed to portray the idealized versions of each kind of use. One of these is the instrumental model. Under this model, "use" consists of making a decision, and social science evidence is assumed to be instructive to the decision. Though there are variations on this theme, the model usually assumes that once the evidence is available, the decision is relatively straightforward. The instrumental model has recently become something of a straw man in discussions of social problem solving, as observers have pointed out deviations from the model on such things as the sequence of events in social problem solving (Rein & White, 1977), the ability of social science to clarify issues (Cohen & Weiss, 1977), the need for findings from social science to be confirmed by ordinary knowledge (Lindblom & Cohen, 1979), the procedural ambiguities inherent in group decisionmaking (March & Olsen, 1979), and the tendency of policies to change incrementally rather than abruptly (Weiss, 1980). The other model of use could be called the conceptual model. Although it does not account for decisions, it does account for a good deal of social science use (Rich, 1977; Weiss, 1977). Under this model, evidence is not specifically instructive, but it is nevertheless relevant, and "use" consists of thinking about the evidence. The most important difference between the conceptual model and the instrumental model is this: Whereas the central feature of the instrumental model is the decision, the central feature of the conceptual model is the human information processor, and that fact leads to several other important distinctions between the models. For instance, human information processors are assumed to already have a considerable body of knowledge before receiving the evidence. They approach the evidence with a well developed, internalized model of the substantive issues at hand. If participants work primarily in education, for instance, they may approach new evidence with knowledge about child development and the learning processes; about how teachers teach and how to tell a good one from a bad one; about the different kinds of effects that different kinds of policies or programs are likely to have and why; and about how well the administrators of existing educational programs are doing their jobs. The presence of this knowledge is essential to the conceptual model. Because the evidence is no longer instructive to a decision, as it was in the instrumental model, it must have a bearing on something else. In the conceptual model, it influences the user's working knowledge of the issues at hand. A second important difference between these two models has to do with the authority that the evidence may have: Whereas a decison may follow almost automatically from the instructions contained in the evidence, information pro

Although studies of single cases occur throughout research fields, they are only recently beginning to appear in evaluation. These studies are difficult to generalize from, because statistical techniques do not apply. This article offers a variety of suggestions for logically analyzing the relationship between a single case and a population so that reasonable generalizations may be possible. Methodologies used by clinicians and by court justices are also examined for their relevance to evaluation methodology.

In order to examine the hypothesis that some Indian groups formerly called "sub-castes" (with the implication of common origin) are in fact separate groups which at different times and places achieved the same social rank, members of eight endogamous groups, all called Brahmins, in Maharashtra were studied for morphological and genetic characters. The statistics developed by Sanghvi-T and G -and an additional one, S (somatoscopic difference) based on his method were used to assess quantitatively the biological affinities between these groups. On the basis of these statistics, independent origins can be suggested for five of the eight groups, and this finding is supported by the scanty historical records. Although the data from a biological survey cannot positively confirm a sociological hypothesis such as this one, it is significant that there is nothing in the data to contradict it.

The authors describe the characteristic scintigraphic and ultrasonic findings of uriniferous perirenal pseudocyst (urinoma) in a neonate with ureteropelvic junction obstruction of the affected kidney.

Follow Through is one of the most controversial programs operated by the United States Office of Education. It represents an attempt to blend service and research, but the blend has been a difficult one for many participants. The research activities have threatened many of the serviceoriented people, and the services have precluded the researchers' abilities to meet high experimental standards. Yet a great deal of useful knowledge has been generated by the program-perhaps even more could have been if the participants had sought to further common goals, rather than battling over the relative importance of different goals. The Follow Through program was legislated as part of the Economic Opportunity Act, which in turn was part of President Johnson's War on Poverty. Johnson and the educational community were optimistic that educational change could mitigate economic disadvantage. Follow Through's forerunner, the Head Start program, was highly popular, but there was some concern that the benefits of Head Start might be dissipating as the children moved through early elementary school. The President wanted "to preserve the hope and opportunity of Head Start by a followthrough program in the early grades" (U.S. Congress 1967, p. 2882) that would solidify the Head Start benefits. As part of the Economic Opportunity legislation, and as a followthrough on Head Start, the program was to be funded through the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), and was intended to provide a variety of services for children-instructional, nutritional, medical, dental, psychological, and social. Thus, poor children and their families were to receive continuous, comprehensive services from the time the child entered Head Start until the time he graduated from third grade. Furthermore, since the program was to involve the community, especially The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Office of Education.

This article describes the events associated with the National Assessment of Chapter 1, a study mandated by Congress in December 1983 in anticipation of its 1987 reauthorization of Chapter 1. The assessment occurred at the time the Reagan Administration was seriously challenging many of Congress's favorite educational programs, including Chapter 1. Despite their serious differences in views about Chapter 1, both Congress and the administration expected the assessment to serve their own needs and each group was worried that the other would have undue influence on the assessment. The article illustrates the politics associated with evaluation by describing the activities of the assessment, the responses of each of these two audiences, and the efforts of each side to control the assessment's agenda. It raises questions about whether an evaluation can really serve multiple audiences.