Research on Teachers' Decisions in Planning Instruction.

Abstract

Introduction Only recently have teachers' intentions, goals, judgments, and decisions been admitted as a legitimate part of research on teaching. About thirty years ago, researchers sought teacher characteristics (e.g., attitudes, interests, abilities) that correlated with student achievement and satisfaction. This criterion-of-effectiveness paradigm produced hundreds of studies and thousands of correlation coefficients (Gage, 1963). 1 It was slowly replaced by the paradigm, primarily because these studies . . . yielded disappointing results: correlations that are nonsignificant, inconsistent from one study to the next, and usually lacking in psychological and educational meaning (Gage, 1963, p. 118). Over the past twenty years, the teaching process paradigm has focused on the correlations between measures of teachers' be-