Educational Leadership - September 2009

The Art and Science of Teaching
Robert J. Marzano
Six Steps to Better
Vocabulary Instruction

Educational Leadership is pleased to announce a new column this year— The Art and Science of Teaching—and a new columnist—noted researcher Robert J. Marzano. Internationally known for his practical translations of current research into effective classroom strategies, Marzano is cofounder of Marzano Research Laboratory, which synthesizes teacher research into components that schools can use for gains in student learning. A well-known speaker and trainer as well as a prolific book author, he draws from 40 years of experience in education. Each month, Marzano will focus on one teacher-tested instructional strategy in education.

After examining for decades the research on instruc- tional strategies and reflecting on my involvement in hundreds of studies, I can say one thing confidently: If you examine all the studies conducted on a given instructional strategy, you will find that some studies indicate the strategy improves student achievement whereas other studies indicate it doesn’t.

Take, for example, the strategy of

providing feedback. Researchers Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi (1996) synthesized the findings from 607 studies on that strategy. They found that the average effect of providing feedback to students is a 16-percentile-point gain. However, more than one-third of the studies indicated that feedback has a negative effect on student achievement. Simply using a strategy does not guarantee positive results. Rather, it’s how someone uses the strategy that determines whether it produces great results, mediocre results, or no results at all.

So what’s a teacher, school, or district to do? Certainly, the answer is not to ignore the

research. In fact, the research is the first place to start. You should scour studies to identify those strategies for which research shows positive effects on student achievement. Next, teachers, schools, and districts should conduct their own informal (and formal) studies on how well an instructional strategy works in their particular context—with their students, their grade level, or their subject matter. No strategy is foolproof. No strategy is proven. You have to see how it works in your particular setting.

Research is beginning
to tell us what does or
doesn’t make a given
strategy work.

They Won’t Forget the Crocodile Teeth

In their research, classroom teachers have taught us something about how to best use specific instructional strategies. Let’s begin with a strategy for teaching vocabulary referred to as the six-step process (Marzano, 2004). It involves the following steps: