ABSTRACT
For over 40 years, educational researchers have engaged in studies to identify instructional and environmental variables that contribute to effective teaching and classroom management. Guided by several key questions (e.g., What makes an effective classroom manager? Is there a universal set of effective teaching skills? Is there a link between teacher behavior and student performance?), researchers have sought to identify and quantify the effects of teachers and teaching in the learning process. This search for relations between classroom processes (teaching) and outcomes (what students learn and how they behave) is known as process-outcome (or process-product) research; it has been the source of important instructional advancements for both improving classroom behavior and promoting student achievement (Gettinger & Stoiber, 1999). Although the volume of process-outcome research has slowed in recent years, researchers continue to affirm that teachers make a difference in school learning. Processoutcome research has been successful in identifying management and instructional variables associated with high student performance. As such, process-outcome research (and more recent applications of this paradigm) has moved the field of teaching closer to being a science, that is, beyond unsupported claims about effective classroom methods toward evidence-based teaching practices derived from credible data.
