ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how knowledge about effective teaching was obtained. It discusses the very earliest research on teacher effectiveness, from the 1960s through the 1990s. The belief that teachers mattered but little was amplified by the Coleman Report. Prior to this report, in the early 1960s, public and Congressional expectations for the progress of students from low-income homes increased considerably. Research like that of Good and Grouws, which was conducted in the process-product (PP) tradition, stimulated a lot of further research on active teaching and explicit teaching. This research has continued to date and consistently shown similar relations between explicit teaching and student achievement. Thousands of studies were conducted prior to the time that PP studies became highly salient and thousands have been conducted since then. Research on teacher expectations is also directly relevant to the improvement of classroom teaching and student learning.
