The New Art and Science of Teaching. Robert J. Marzano
knowledge about what students know and don’t know. This is because a measurement approach translates scores on assessments into scores on a proficiency scale. No matter what type of assessment a teacher uses, it is always translated into the metric of a scale. For example, a teacher uses a pencil-and-paper assessment and assigns a score of 2.0 on the proficiency scale. A few days later, the teacher has a discussion with the student about score 3.0 content and concludes that the student has partial knowledge of that content. The teacher assigns a score of 2.5 on the proficiency scale based on that interaction. A week later, the teacher administers a test on the 3.0 content and concludes that the student demonstrates no major errors or omissions. Based on this assessment, the teacher assigns a score of 3.0 on the proficiency scale. This process employs a measurement perspective like that shown in figure 2.4.
Figure 2.4 indicates that assessments can take many forms, including tests, discussions, student-generated assessments, and so on. These different types of assessment might have their own specific format scores. For example, a teacher might initially score 2.0 content on a percentage basis. This percentage score is a format-specific score. Teachers can then translate format-specific scores into a score on a proficiency scale. This is the essence of the measurement process—assessments of differing formats and scoring protocols are always translated into a score on a proficiency scale. Measurements over time provide a picture of students’ status at a particular time and students’ growth. I believe this process allows teachers to gather more accurate, more useful information about students’ status and growth than the current practice of averaging test scores.
Source: Adapted from Marzano, Norford, Finn, & Finn, in press.
Figure 2.4: The measurement process.
CHAPTER 3
Conducting Direct Instruction Lessons
As discussed in chapter 1, the second major category in The New Art and Science of Teaching is content. This category involves strategies teachers use specifically to help students learn the information and skills that are the focus of instruction. This category includes design areas with strategies for three distinct types of lessons: (1) direct instruction, (2) practicing and deepening, and (3) knowledge application. A final design area within the content category includes those strategies applicable in all three types of lessons. Effective pedagogy is the teacher’s use of the strategies within all four design areas in a coordinated fashion. In this chapter, we focus on direct instruction lessons.
In some circles, direct instruction has a tarnished reputation. It is commonly associated with didactic, lecture-oriented presentations during which students are passive consumers of information. While it is true that teachers can execute direct instruction—and all other types of instruction—in an unparticipatory manner. In fact, research continually supports the necessary role of direct instruction. Such recognition usually occurs amid loud calls for inquiry-based instruction. To illustrate, in 2011, I wrote an article in Educational Leadership titled “The Perils and Promises of Discovery Learning” (Marzano, 2011). There I report on a meta-analysis of 580 comparisons between discovery learning and direct instruction in which the authors (Alfieri, Broocks, Aldrich, & Tenenbaum, 2011) find that direct instruction is superior to discovery learning in most situations. As I will discuss in chapter 5, discovery learning has a place in the rotation of lesson types, but direct instruction is foundational to its success. More specifically, direct instruction is essential when teachers present new content to students.
Regarding direct instruction lessons, the desired mental states and processes in students are:
When content is new, students understand which parts are important and how the parts fit together.
The following elements are important to effective direct instruction.
Element 6: Chunking Content
When information is new to students, they best process it in small, understandable increments. This is because learners can hold only small amounts of information in their working memories (see Marzano, 1992, 2007). To illustrate, a teacher presenting students with new information about the topic of global warming might do so using a few pages from a textbook. To present the content in digestible bites—chunks—for students, the teacher first reads through the pages in the book, looking for natural breaks in the content. He might decide that he will have students stop after the first three paragraphs and provide time for them to reflect on the content. The next stop would be at the bottom of the page, and so on. Regardless of the form or venue, the practice is the same—the teacher halts input regarding new content at strategic points so students have time to think about what they just experienced.
The strategies within this element appear in table 3.1.
Table 3.1: Chunking Content
| Strategy | Description |
| Using preassessment data to plan for chunks | Based on students’ initial understanding of new content, the teacher presents new content in larger or smaller chunks. |
| Presenting content in small, sequentially related sets | The teacher chunks content into small, digestible bites for students. If presenting new declarative knowledge, the chunks comprise concepts and details that logically go together. If presenting new procedural knowledge, the chunks comprise steps in a process that go together. |
| Allowing for processing time between chunks | The teacher has students work together to process chunks of information. |
Source: Adapted from Marzano Research, 2016e.
Unlike strategies in most other elements, those listed for chunking are best employed sequentially. The first strategy in this element—using preassessment data to plan for chunks—deals with determining students’ readiness for new content. This is important because the more students already know about content, the bigger the chunks can be; the less they know about the content, the smaller the chunks should be. A preassessment can be quite informal. For example, a preassessment about a strategy for multicolumn subtraction might simply be presenting a problem to the entire class and asking students to describe how they would approach the task. If the vast majority of students seem to understand how to approach the problem, the teacher could conclude to present the process in two sets of steps since students already seem to have a general sense of what to do. If students do not seem familiar with the process, the teacher would spend more time presenting and exemplifying individual steps. A preassessment could also be more structured and take the form of a hardcopy test that addresses the various levels of the proficiency scale.
The second strategy deals with the actual execution of the chunking process. While doing so, the teacher continually monitors the extent to which students understand the content. If the students seem confused, the teacher delves back into the content before presenting a new chunk of content.
The last strategy in table 3.1 deals with providing a structured time for students to interact about the content the teacher previously presented. This processing time is structured so that students are organized in groups and group members have specific responsibilities.
When the strategies in this element produce