Elizabeth Anne VanderPutten

Areas of Research Interests My primary research interests at this time are effective schools and the relationships between teacher behaviors and student learning. Research over the past 30 years suggests that the school should be the unit of focus for educational reform. I am currently involved in synthesizing the growing body of literature on school effectiveness. This literature includes work by anthropologists, sociologists, economists and educators. I will include literature and findings in the international literature that is in English. In terms of student learning, I begin from the premise that learning as a verb is what the student does. Learning as a noun is an outcome of the activities in which the student has been engaged in the process of education. The interesting question for me is what is it that teachers do that gets students involved so that they learn what it is the teacher desires them to learn. A closely related area of interest concerns the mental constructs that guide teachers practices.