What Is High-Quality Instruction?

According to a study of 364 lessons, few students receive exemplary instruction.

In an effort to assess the quality of mathematics and science instruction in U.S. classrooms, our Horizon Research team spent 18 months observing more than 350 representative lessons and conducting follow-up interviews with teachers to explore their instructional decision making. The assertion by Burstein and colleagues (1995) that educators cannot measure some aspects of instruction without observing teacher-student interactions expresses the need that inspired our Inside the Classroom study (Weiss, Pasley, Smith, Banilower, & Heck, 2003). We documented, analyzed, and assessed lessons according to specific indicators in several areas: the quality of the mathematics and science content, the quality of implementation, and the extent to which the classroom culture facilitated learning (see Sample Indicators, p. 27).

The observers rated individual indicators in each area on a 1–5 scale, with 1 designating poor and 5 designating excellent, and then looked across these indicators to categorize the lesson's overall quality as low (1, 2), medium (low 3, solid 3), or high (high 3, 4, 5). Low-quality lessons were unlikely to enhance students' understanding of important mathematics or science content or their ability to engage successfully in the processes of science or mathematics. At the other end of the scale, high-quality lessons were structured and implemented in a manner that engaged students with important mathematics or science concepts; such lessons were very likely to enhance student understanding of these concepts and to develop their capacity to do mathematics or science successfully.

Lack of Rigor and Excellence