A Thinking Study.

The Appalachia Educational Laboratory has concluded that a yearlong professional development program to improve the way teachers encourage critical thinking by their students is having a positive but limited effect on teacher performance.

The program, known as QUILT (Questioning and Understanding to Improve Learning and Thinking), is based on the premise that the quality of teachers' questions affects how much children, especially those at risk of failure, learn. The study involved 1,200 teachers in 13 school districts.

AEL's preliminary findings indicate that teachers who received the complete program, including periodic collegiums and observation by others, made more changes in the ways they used questions when compared to non-participants. But the study also found the changes to be modest in comparison to the goals set by the participating teachers.

The study also suggested that a single-event staff development, even when three days in duration, is not effective in sustaining change.