Impact of Teachers on Students

Teachers have direct daily contact with students and turn school policies into classroom practices. Accordingly, teachers should be expected to play an important part in student achievement. Good teachers should prod students to achieve, and poor teachers should have less success. (p.593)

Because of the impact teachers have on student success it is important to conduct investigations of differences in teacher variables. It is only by knowing differences between teachers that there can be ongoing assessment of whether these differences contribute to differences in teachers' impacts on students' school and later career achievement.

The proposed study is an investigation of differences among teachers in the area of critical thinking skills instruction. Critical thinking was selected for evaluation because instruction in thinking skills has increasingly been cited as important to both education system success and academic excellence (Ediger, 1987). Thus, differences in teachers' views of what critical thinking is and how to teach it may have importance in terms of teachers' eventual impact on student success, influencing not only how well they learn these skills but use them in life.

Moreover, since a good deal of the existing work on teacher variables has shown teachers to differ depending upon whether they are elementary or secondary scho

. . .
; Klausmeier, 1991) have reported that part of fulfilling the functions of both general instruction and development of high potential students is not only teaching course curricula to students, but also teaching students how to think. In other words, existing literature indicates that students can be taught to be good or critical thinkers. Regarding this research, Klausmeier (1991) reports that teaching cognitive skills such as critical thinking has shown that the level of learning is really quite different for elementary and secondary school students' this because the reasoning ability of students differs at different levels of their development. For example, Piaget's (1970) foundational work on cognitive development stated that, developmentally, thinking progresses through four qualitatively different stages. These are: (1) The Sensorimotor Stage - This initial stage which lasts from birth to age 2, consists of thinking which occurs primarily through motor and sensory actions. It is really the beginning of symbolic thinking. It is the stage during which coordination of sensory and motor activities improve and which objects and people, including self, are differentiated from one another and recognized as permanent. (2)
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Formal Operations, , Statement Purpose, Popp Cholvat, NOTE CINDY, Cashion Basirico, Operations Stage, Sensorimotor Stage, Preoperational Stage, Stone Nielsen, critical thinking, elementary secondary, secondary school, elementary secondary school, thinking skills, school teachers, cognitive development, secondary school teachers, critical thinking skills, teachers' views, views opinions, klausmeier 1991, teachers' views opinions, opinions critical, opinions critical thinking,
Approximate Word count = 1428
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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