Scientific Management of the Classroom

Fundamentally this book is a resource to help teachers become researchers. The idea is for teachers to take responsibility for applying the methods of scientific research to do research on their own classrooms and thereby improve learning outcomes for their students. Teachers can use the methods outlined in this book to understand what is happening in their classroom in the same way researchers in medicine, for example, attempt to understand whether a particular drug or procedure is effective at helping patients improve their health in medical research. Although this book is intended mainly for teachers, researcher other than teachers can use the methods in this book as a guide to their research. The methods described in this book are general-purpose strategies and can be easily applied in nonacademic settings. For example, the material in the chapter on reliability and validity can be used in connection with achievement tests developed by teachers themselves as well as general-purpose surveys in marketing, psychology, political science, and sociology, among other fields.