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This study explores two approaches to directly measuring the quality of instruction: teachers' assignments with student work and focused lesson observations. The technical quality and potential feasibility of these approaches for measuring instruction in large numbers of classrooms are compared within two different content areas (reading comprehension and mathematics). Generalizability and decision studies determined the optimal number of observations and assignments needed to obtain a reliable measure of a teacher's practice, and the association of these direct measures of instructional quality with student achievement was estimated. For both content areas, four assignments assessed by two raters yielded a reliable estimate of quality and as few as two observations yielded a reliable estimate of quality when teachers complied with the requirements of the research. The quality of observed instruction and teachers' assignments differentially predicted gains in students' achievement on the Stanford Achievem...

In this study we investigated the relation of rigorous instructional practices and teachers' efforts to create a respectful, collaborative learning environment to students' positive behavior toward one another and to the rate and quality of students' participation in classroom discussions. Full class period (i.e., 50-minute) observations of English language arts and mathematics lessons were conducted in 34 sixth- and seventh-grade classrooms in five high-poverty, urban, public middle schools (N = 608 students, 64 observations). Raters coded each lesson for the affective qualities of the classroom environment, the rigor of curricular tasks including guidelines for student work, and the quality of teacher-student verbal exchanges. We applied multiple regression techniques to explain predictive relations between classroom climate, instructional quality, and student behavior. Results indicated that the degree of respect that teachers showed students significantly predicted students' behavior toward o...