Using Teachers’ Assignments as an Indicator of Classroom Practice

This report describes research developing indicators of classroom practice for monitoring the influence of school reform initiatives on students’ learning environments, and supporting the improvement of instructional practice. The work reported here entailed collecting assignments and student work and observing classrooms in schools participating in a large-scale urban effort. Overall the reliability and consistency of the assignment ratings were good. Results also indicate that the quality of the assignments was statistically significantly associated with the quality of observed instruction and student work. It appears that our method shows promise for use in large-scale evaluation settings and identifies important dimensions of practice that could support teacher self-evaluation and reflection.