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I suggest that the teacher effects era, between 1955 and 1980, was an impressive run of cumulative research. During this period, over 100 correlational and experimental studies were conducted using a common design and the different observation instruments shared many common instructional procedures. And it was cumulative: researchers cited and built upon the instructional findings of others.After several years of immersion in the education world, I am just now finding out about this.
Return of the repressed.
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Of course teacher quality matters, as does the curriculum. But policymakers and journalists who fantasize about closing the achievement gap by finding better teachers will be disappointed -- the study below found that good teachers magnify the differences between the best and worst students. I was pleasantly surprised to see "genetics" mentioned as a factor in learning how to read.
Study: Better teachers help children read faster
SEATTLE – Genetics play the biggest role in determining how fast a child learns to read, but a good teacher can make a measurable difference as well, according to a study released Thursday.
Florida State University used twins assigned to different classrooms to develop the conclusions.
Researchers studied more than 550 first- and second-grade classrooms with at least one identical twin and more than 1,000 classes with at least one fraternal twin.
Among the identical twins, 42 pairs out of 280 pairs showed significant differences in reading improvement during the year studied, said lead researcher Jeanette Taylor, an associate professor of psychology at Florida State.
In each case, the teachers also had significantly different quality scores. Twins with similarly good teachers got similar scores.
"If you have identical twins, they should do very similarly in school," Taylor said.
...
Genetic differences between students seemed to disappear in classrooms taught by less effective teachers, because children don't reach their potential, the researchers found.
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