Research Notes

Chicago Study: Students Rise to Challenging Assignments: Give students demanding work and they will rise to the challenge. It's a sentiment that's almost a given in the nationwide campaign to raise academic standards.

Now a study offers some hard evidence that students indeed produce better work--at least in reading and mathematics--when teachers ask for it. As part of an ongoing study of Chicago schools that won improvement grants from the Annenberg Foundation, researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research two years ago began analyzing classroom assignments and student work at 12 elementary schools.

At each school, the investigators asked two teachers each in grades 3, 6, and 8 to provide examples of assignments they had given that they considered to be typical or challenging. The teachers also provided samples of student work, particularly assignments produced in response to the tasks that they considered challenging. In all, the research team collected more than 1,400 pieces of work by the end of...