Abstracts - Earli

conceptions about who is granted authority in their classrooms with regard to ‘evaluating students’responses’ and ‘answering students’ questions’, but not for ‘asking for help’.Multiple implementations of a lesson plan: From surface features to basic dimensions ofinstructional qualityEckhard Klieme, German Institute for Intern. Educational Research, GermanyWithin a Swiss-German study on instructional quality in math education (see Pauli et al.), four outof 40 teachers - by chance - made use of identical teaching methods when introducing thePythagorean theorem to their students. Each of those teachers implemented a lesson plan andrelated material (e.g., ready-to-use work sheets) that had been published shortly before in aprofessional journal for math teachers. The lesson plan suggested that students should (a) work ingroups, using the work sheets to explore different cases (triangles), (b) share findings with othergroups, (c) engage in classroom discourse to generate a general hypothesis (ideally thePythagorean theorem), (d) work in groups again to check the hypothesis in different cases.Altogether, the four classes outperformed other classes in an immediate posttest, even aftercontrolling for pre-knowledge. However, discourse analysis as well as ratings of instructionalquality indicate differences between those four implementations on a deeper level. The higher theproportion of lesson time used for controlling and comparing student solutions, for publicdiscussion of problems, or for making notices on theoretical concepts, the more students gain fromthose lessons. Also, high-inference ratings on teacher clarity, explication of cognitice strategies,and mediation by teachers are positively correlated with value-added test scores, while pressure forachievement as well as individualized instruction and amount of student cooperation shownegative effects. Thus, deep level aspects of instructional quality seem to be operational incognitive learning. The findings support the present authors model of three such dimensions,namely (i) structured and efficient classroom management, (ii) supportive classroom climate, and(iii) challenging cognitive activation, the third dimension being the strongest predictor of studentunderstanding. Multi-level analyses of all 40 lessons included in the study also support the model.Teaching activities and quality of instruction – results of a video-based study on mathematicsteachingChristine Pauli, University of Zurich, SwitzerlandUrs Grob, University of Zurich, SwitzerlandKurt Reusser, University of Zurich, SwitzerlandBarbara Drollinger-Vetter, University of Zurich, SwitzerlandFrank Lipowsky, University of Kassel, GermanyThe presentation deals with the interaction of instructional methods (as elements of the visiblestructure of the teaching and learning process) and general quality indicators, which cannot bedirectly determined through observable instructional features, with regard to students’ learningprogress. We report on a bi-national video study on mathematics instruction in Germany andSwitzerland, in which 20 German and 20 Swiss teachers and over 900 students (8th/9th schoolyear) participated. In the framework of the study, 39 videotaped instructional units on theintroduction to Pythagorean theorem were analysed. Besides the videos, student surveys and testsare available to record the student conditions and cognitive outcomes. Presented are video-basedanalyses of the interplay of three observable key features of constructivist instruction (optimaldegree of opportunities for independent exploration of problem solutions; opportunities for dealingwith demanding problems in practice phases; quality of teaching discourse) with general indicatorsof instructional quality (cognitive activation of the students, adaptive learning support). Starting– 70 –