Constructivist Teaching and Student Achievement: The Results of a School-level Classroom Observation Study in Washington

Foreword

In 2000 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began an education initiative in Washington State that centered on school reinvention with the goal of improving student learning. As part of that initiative third party evaluation teams have been monitoring the process and progress of reinvention and collecting various forms of data from the schools. During the 2001-02 school year one of these teams conducted an extensive classroom observation study in 34 schools to determine the degree to which "powerful teaching and learning" (also called constructivist teaching or authentic instruction) was present in the schools. The findings from that study were presented in a descriptive report and showed that this form of teaching was present in about 17 percent of the classrooms they observed. The data from that classroom observation study have been provided to the Washington School Research Center for further analysis, resulting in this technical report on the relationship of constructivist teaching to student achievement.

The findings presented here are at the same time instructive and disturbing. The relationship between student family income and student achievement is expected and a consistent finding in virtually all studies using aggregated school-level data. The strong relationship between constructivist teaching practices and student achievement is somewhat surprising, given the aggregated nature of the data used in the analyses. From a theoretical perspective the state essential learnings, WASL assessments and the theoretical model of constructivist teaching used in the observation study appear to be very complementary, and these data support that model. This finding suggests that Washington schools should consider the potential advantages of these instructional practices.

Critics of American education have claimed that children living in poverty often receive an inferior educational experience. Unfortunately, at least in this sample of schools, the relatively strong negative correlation between school-level student family income and constructivist teaching shows that students in schools with lower levels of student family income receive less intellectually demanding instruction and less instruction of the type that is a predictor of academic success than do students in schools with higher levels of family income. This finding should be concern to all of us as we work to improve education in this state.

Jeffrey T. Fouts, Ed.D. Executive Director
Washington School Research Center
Lynnwood, WA

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