Task Engagement and the Consistency of Pedagogical Controls: An Ecological Study of Differently Structured Classroom Settings

Managing seatwork-indeed, managing classrooms so that students spend most of their time on the assigned task-is a difficult job for many primary grade teachers, particularly when they are usually expected to both manage seatwork and work with a small group of children. Less effective teachers, in particular, appear to have most of their trouble in the management of classrooms and the seatwork. This area merits more study. The first task is to describe what is going on. Such description could include the percentage of time spent on seatwork in different educational contexts and the percentage of assigned seatwork time that children spend in actual on-task work.