What works in education? How do we know? How can teachers find out? How can
educational research find its way into the classroom? How can we apply it to
help our individual students? Questions like these arise in most schools, and
busy educators often don't have time to find the answers. Robert J. Marzano,
Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock have examined decades of research
findings to distill the results into nine broad teaching strategies
that have positive effects on student learning:
• Identifying
similarities and differences.
• Summarizing and note taking.
• Reinforcing effort and providing recognition.
• Homework and practice.
• Nonlinguistic representations.
• Cooperative learning.
• Setting objectives and providing feedback.
• Generating and testing hypotheses.
• Questions, cues, and advance organizers.
This list is not new. But what is surprising is finding out what
a big difference it makes, for
example, when students learn how to take good notes, work in groups, and use
graphic organizers. The authors provide statistical effect
sizes and show how these
translate intopercentile gains for
students, for each strategy. And each chapter presents extended classroom
examples of teachers and students in action; models of successful instruction;
and many "frames," rubrics, organizers, and charts to help teachers plan and
implement the strategies.