Research has shown that people generally attribute success at any given task to one of four causes:
1. Ability – seemingly helpful, but what if you don’t believe that you have the requisite skill? In this case, students might sabotage their own success!
2. Effort – what we’re hoping for students to believe
3. Other people – not helpful
4. Luck – not helpful

Generalities from the research on Reinforcing Effort:
1. Not all students realize the importance of believing in effort.
-This might seem obvious to us, but not so for students!
2. Students can learn to change their beliefs to an emphasis on effort.
-Therefore, it’s a challenge for us to teach them to make the connection! It’s heartening that it IS POSSIBLE for them to change this belief.

Classroom practice – Ideas for how teachers can help students learn to change their beliefs to emphasize effort.
Share examples of times that people succeeded by continuing to try even when things got difficult. These could be personal examples, or stories of well-known athletes, educators, and political or social leaders. Some ideas are: the movie Rudy, the book The Little Engine that Could, or this lesson plan idea about the Olympics that I hope to use at the beginning of this school year:
For a week (this year, it’ll be the first week or so of school), give no “normal” homework. Instead, assign students to watch the Olympics every night all week. Have them pay particular attention to the “up close and personal” stories about specific athletes. They should look for examples of ordinary people who achieved extraordinary things because they believed that sustained effort would lead to achievement of their goals. The first 5 minutes of each period that week, then, use to let people discuss, in small groups and as a class, the stories they hear and the different strategies that the athletes used to keep believing in themselves. By Monday, each student should come up with a way to remind themselves to keep trying when things get difficult in class.

There was an interesting rubric that you might want to use for helping students make the connection between their own effort and achievement. You may download it here.

They could have titled this section “praise” or “rewards,” but either of those would not have been technically accurate. In fact, in some studies about “praise,” it was found that there was a very minimal, or even negative effect on achievement. Therefore, it’s important to take note of exactly what is meant by “recognition.”

On page 56, there is a very helpful list of Guidelines for Effective Praise vs. Ineffective Praise. You may download the list here.

Generalities from the research for Providing Recognition:
1. Rewards do not necessarily have a negative effect on intrinsic motivation.
2. Reward is most effective when it is contingent on the attainment of some standard of performance.
3. Abstract symbolic recognition is more effective than tangible rewards.

Generalities from the research on Summarizing:

1. To effectively summarize, students must delete some information, substitute some information, and keep some information.
2. To effectively delete, substitute, and keep information, students must analyze the information at a fairly deep level.
3. Being aware of the explicit structure of information is an aid to summarizing information.

Classroom Practice in Summarizing:
“Rule-Based” Strategy: This strategy is one of following a set of rules or steps that produce a summary. Here are the rules:
•Delete trivial material that is unnecessary to understanding.
•Delete redundant material.
•Substituting superordinate terms for lists (e.g, “flowers” for “daisy, tulips, and roses”)
•Select a topic sentence, or invent one if it is missing

There are several Summary Frames provided in the book. Here’s the list:
•Narrative Frame
•Topic-Restriction-Illustration Frame
•Definition Frame
•Argumentation Frame
•Problem/Solution Frame
•Conversation Frame

Here are a few for you to download (Narrative, Topic-Restriction, Definition). I’m interested in using them in my classroom; I’m also interested in how you might use them in your classroom. Please comment on this article if you have any feedback on these, and any ideas of how you might use them (or some that I have not typed, but are included in the book) in your classroom.

Generalities from the research on Note Taking:
1.    Verbatim note taking is, perhaps, the least effective way to take notes.
-When students are trying to record everything they hear or read, they are not engaged in the act of synthesizing information.
-Trying to record all of what is heard or read takes up so much of a student’s working memory that she does not have “room” to analyze the incoming information.
2.    Notes should be considered a work in progress.
-Review and revise the notes; correct misconceptions

3.    Notes should be used as study guides for tests.
-Frequently, students don’t know about this, or how to structure time to take advantage of this.

4.    The more notes that are taken, the better.
-This is opposite to a common misconception that “less is more.” In fact, many universities explicitly advise students to keep their notes brief, and not put too much material in notes.

Classroom Practice in Note Taking:
Teacher-Prepared Notes
…provide students a clear picture of what the teacher considers important.
…provide students with a model of how notes might be taken.

Formats for Notes
-No one correct way (Cornell style or otherwise)
-Informal Outline – indenting indicates major ideas and their related details
-Webbing – uses relative sizes of circles to indicate the importance of ideas & lines to indicate relationships
-Combination of the two – one on each side of the page; the right side of the page would display the information in some visual way
-At the end of the note-taking, or periodically throughout the process, take a strip across the bottom and summarize what has been learned. My own observation is that this does not have to be at the bottom of the piece of paper. This could be in the middle of the page, and class could continue on the same or related topic the next day.

• 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
• Specific Applications

The first in the list, which I will now discuss, is Identifying similarities and differences

Generalities from the research:
1. Presenting students with explicit guidance in identifying similarities and differences enhances students’ understanding of and ability to use knowledge.

2. Asking students to independently identify similarities and differences enhances students’ understanding of and ability to use knowledge.

3. Representing similarities and differences in graphic or symbolic form enhances students’ understanding of and ability to use knowledge.

4. Identification of similarities and differences can be accomplished in a variety of ways. The identification of similarities and differences is a highly robust activity.
Four main forms of identifying similarities and differences:
1. Comparing (and contrasting)
The process of identifying similarities and differences between or among things or ideas.

2. Classifying
The process of grouping things that are alike into categories on the basis of their characteristics.

3. Creating metaphors
The process of identifying a general or basic pattern in a specific topic and then finding another topic that appears to be quite different but that has the same general pattern.

4. Creating analogies
The process of identifying relationships between pairs of concepts (identifying relationships between relationships)

Reading this is such an abbreviated form might be dry and dull without the research to strengthen it. Hey, maybe this is refreshing because it gets right to the point, I don’t know. Anyway, for me, looking it over now seems to be not quite as powerful. I plan to revisit this chapter’s content periodically to see if I am applying what I’ve learned here. It’s not that Marzano has found earth-shatteringly new information that most educators have never heard of. Rather, he is emphasizing the strategies that give “more bang for our buck”; he’s pointing out those very most crucial strategies that will yield the most student achievement. This is encouraging to me, and it motivates me to pay attention to the list of categories of strategies that he’s described here. I hope that this is helpful for you.

Here begins a series of blog articles that summarize, chapter by chapter, Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement by Robert Marzano, et al.

My intention in embarking on this project is to more fully digest the book, examine how I might be able to apply the findings of the research that Marzano brings to us.

There are many strategies mentioned; their placement in this book are based on many, many research studies. Sometimes we read articles and studies that come across as merely one person’s opinion (or the opinion of a small group). I find much more credibility in this book, since it is was is called a “meta-study,” a study of studies. In the book, we are given “Generalities” for each strategy (or category of strategies, as sometimes is more appropriately labeled, since there are so many different ways to apply the given strategy. We are also given “Classroom Applications.” These I won’t spend a lot of time on, but I will definitely outline the Generalities here.

Sometimes, there is a useful list, a lesson plan, a template, or some other such document that is part of the book. In these cases, I will endeavor to re-create those documents in a way that I plan to use them. Then, I will allow you to simply click on some text within these blog articles to download the document.

Thus, here begins my notes on the first chapter…..

Research in Education is New! Lots of recent research

A tremendous amount of research has been done in the last 10 years on effective classroom instruction. Practically no research was done before 1970. We are in a new era in education; we can actually point to certain strategies or classroom practices and say with certainty – this works! That is, we can be confident that it will enhance student achievement. Hence the title of the book.

Some have looked at differences in student achievement and blown off the data, citing unchangeable (by schools, anyway) factors such as students’ natural ability/aptitude, socioeconomic status, and home environment.

Rigorous, legitimate studies have given us helpful, useful guidance into what works in the classroom.

Effect size

Marzano, et al, frequently refer to something called “effect size” when quantifying the effectiveness of a particular strategy. To understand this, a brief discussion about the old “bell-shaped curve” (normal distribution) is necessary. There are three standard deviations above the mean, and three below. When the given strategy is shown to be so effective that it brings students one standard deviation up, the effect size is said to be 1.00.

Marzano, et al, frequently refer to something called “effect size” when quantifying the effectiveness of a particular strategy. To understand this, a brief discussion about the old “bell-shaped curve” (normal distribution) is necessary. There are three standard deviations above the mean, and three below. When the given strategy is shown to be so effective that it brings students one standard deviation up, the effect size is said to be 1.00.

These scores can be translated into “percentile gain,” as well. Here’s how this works:

Since we know that 34% of student scores fall between the mean and the first standard deviation, and 14% of the scores fall between the first and second deviation, and so on.

These are interesting and give statistical, scientific credibility to the findings presented in this book. However, for those not numbers oriented, or those not terribly interested in statistical minutiae, I will refrain from slogging through all of these numbers in this series of blog articles. I might make note of the fact that a certain strategy was much more or less effective than another.

What we don’t know yet:

I was pleased to read that the authors admitted that there are several major questions they don’t have the answer to yet. If they claimed to know everything, I would be suspicious…
-Are some instructional strategies more effective in certain subject areas?
-Are some instructional strategies more effective at certain grade levels?
-Are some instructional strategies more effective with students from different backgrounds?
-Are some instructional strategies more effective with students of different aptitude?

“[There is a] need to study the effects of instructional strategies on specific types of students in specific situations, with specific subject matters. Until we find the answers to the preceding questions, teachers should rely on their knowledge of their students, their subject matter, and their situation to identify the most appropriate instruction strategies.”