| "The areas of practice identified here rest on considerable research weight, are entirely or partially school controllable, and most—though not all— can be implemented without significant new expenditures." |
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What combination of schooling conditions and practices holds the greatest promise for improving student learning? While there is no scientifically provable or globally agreed-upon answer, a new booklet by NWREL researcher Kathleen Cotton identifies key factors that enable virtually all students to learn successfully.
Since the early research on “effective schools” and “teacher effects” of the 1970s, researchers have identified hundreds of schooling practices that help educators improve student achievement. When launching school improvement projects, schools and districts face the daunting task of sifting through these options and making choices based on locally determined goals, state standards, and a host of other factors.
The Schooling Practices that Matter Most can make this task more manageable. Sharing information gleaned from her work for the Laboratory’s School Improvement Program, Cotton draws upon the general research base of effective educational practices and identifies those that “pack the greatest punch” for raising student performance. These include 10 contextual attributes and five instructional attributes that are critical for student success:
Contextual Attributes
Instructional Attributes
“The areas of practice identified here rest on considerable research weight, are entirely or partially school controllable, and most—though not all—can be implemented without significant new expenditures,” notes Cotton.
The author shares her reasons for selecting each attribute, succinctly highlights its key points, and identifies where the supporting research comes from. Despite the wealth of research addressing these practices, she keeps the book to a manageable 40 pages, choosing a dozen or so key support pieces for each practice identified. These include both studies and reviews, classic and obscure reports, and older and more recent research.
With schools throughout the Northwest immersed in comprehensive school reform efforts, Cotton also makes some observations about how the attributes can work together to benefit student learning.
“Experience with school reform efforts, the development and use of more sophisticated research designs, and a growing understanding that the school is the most meaningful unit of analysis have led to a more holistic view of what it takes to raise student performance,” she explains. “‘Effective practices’ cannot be maximally effective without schoolwide buy-in and support, and because practices interact, they affect one another’s impact.”
Cotton qualifies her discussion by pointing out that not all of these attributes must be present in order for any given student to learn well. Some students come from environments that provide them with sufficient experiences, materials, and support to compensate for the lack of some of these factors. Others have considerable innate academic ability, which allows them to perform well in less-than-ideal circumstances. When talking about educating all students to high standards, however, the author argues that all of these characteristics should be present.
While these 15 attributes are critical for educational success, Cotton cautions readers that they do not, in and of themselves, guarantee it. “Setting trivial learning goals or imparting only superficial learning content will produce inferior results, no matter what else might be going on,” she stresses. “Implicit in discussions of elements such as ‘a primary focus on learning’ and ‘clear and focused instruction’ is the supposition that what is taught is worth knowing in the first place, and that it is treated in sufficient depth to engage students’ interest and offer them a challenge.”
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Date of Last Update: 8/19/2005 
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