Academic Achievement Challenge : What Really Works In The Classroom? - 00 edition

''In her last book, Jeanne Chall brings her vast experience with the field of education and her rigorous scholarship to bear on what has become the hottest topic of the day. Expanding her focus from literacy to the full range of curriculum, Chall concludes that the preponderance of evidence supports a strong teacher-centered approach to education over methods that transfer primary responsibility for learning to students. This book may well define the educational debates of the next decade. It provides both a needed historical perspective on educational fads and facts, and an incisive analysis of the forces affecting educational change. As such, The Academic Achievement Challenge ought to be required reading for anyone entering the profession of education today.''

--Andrew Biemiller, Professor and Coordinator of MA Teacher Education Program, Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto

''It would create a revolution in American education if every teacher, parent, and school board member were to read this book. What a wonderful, informative, readable, commonsense discussion of what works in classrooms and what usually doesn't work.''

--Diane Ravitch, author of The Troubled Crusade; Research Professor, New York University; Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Research and Improvement

''The capstone work of a great scholar, this book synthesizes all the relevant research to show that student-centered teaching does not live up to its education-school billing. Rather, it is teacher-centered education which leads to greater excellence and fairness. For the sake of our children, we must not wait decades, as we did with reading, before heeding the truths uncovered by the matchless scholarship of Jeanne Chall.''

--E.D. Hirsch, Jr, University Professor of Education and Humanities, University of Virginia

Guilford Publications Web Site, January, 2001

1. Academic Achievement: An American Dilemma
2. Traditional, Teacher-Centered Education versus Progressive, Student-Centered Education
3. Twentieth-Century Trends in Educational Policy: The Shift toward Student-Centered Programs
4. Trends in Specific Areas of the Curriculum: Reading, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies, 1900 to the 1990s
5. Research on the Overall Effects of Teacher- and Student-Centered Educational Programs
6. Descriptive Studies of Early Educational Experiments
7. Student-Centered Education: From Theory to Practice
8. Socioeconomic and Learning Difference Effects
9. Parents, the Media, and other Nonschool Educators
10. Where Do We Go from Here? Conclusions and Recommendations

Appendix: Key Differences between Teacher-Centered and Student-Centered Instruction