Using Standardized Observation to Conceptualize, Measure, and Improve Classroom Processes

Many children spend more of their waking hours in classrooms than they do at home; within these settings they are exposed to experiences that for better or worse, intended and unintended, shape their development—they may learn to read, write, and think critically; they make friends and have to face the inevitable challenges of peer relationships; and they are oriented increasingly to become productive, independent members of a larger society. Interest is keen in the extent of these classroom effects, the methods of producing and reproducing them at various levels of scale, and understanding the mechanisms responsible for them. In fact, it could be argued that these interests in classroom effects are among the core focus of educational policy, practice, and research at the present time. The scale is staggering, with millions of classroom teachers working each day in public education settings, more than 200,000 of whom are new entrants to the profession each year, and with recent reports indicating 87 percent of whom leave the profession before a decade of experience (Pianta and Allen, 2008; Loeb and Béteille, 2008; Anderson, 2008).