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AbstractWhen attempting to identify educational settings that are most effective in improving student achievement, classroom process (that is, the way in which a teacher interacts with his or her students) is a key feature of interest. Unfortunately, high‐quality assessment of the student‐teacher interaction occurs all too infrequently, despite the critical role that understanding and measuring such processes can play in school improvement.This article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of two common approaches to studying these processes—direct classroom observation and annual surveys of teachers—and then describes the ways in which instructional logs can be used to overcome some of the limitations of these two approaches when gathering data on curriculum content and coverage. Classroom observations are expensive, require extensive training of raters to ensure consistency in the observations, and because of their expense generally cannot be conducted frequently enough to enable the researcher to generalize observational findings to the entire school year or illuminate the patterns of instructional change that occur across the school year. Annual surveys are less expensive but often suffer from self‐report bias and the bias that occurs when teachers are asked to retrospectively report on their activities over the course of a single year. Instructional logs offer a valid, reliable, and relatively cost‐effective alternative for collecting detailed information about classroom practice and can overcome some of the limitations of both observations and annual surveys.

Economic sociology is a rapidly expanding field, applying sociology's core insight--that individuals behave according to scripts that are tied to social roles--to economic behavior. It places homo economicus (that tried-and-true fictive actor who is completely rational, acts only out of self-interest, and has perfect information) in context. In this way, it places a construct into a framework that more closely approximates the world in which we live. But, as an academic field, economic sociology has lost focus. The New Economic Sociology remedies this. The book comprises twenty of the most representative and widely read articles in the field's history--its classics--and organizes them according to four themes at the heart of sociology: institutions, networks, power, and cognition. Dobbin's substantial and engagingly written introduction (including his rich comparison of Yanomamo chest-beaters and Wall Street bond-traders) sets a clear framework for what follows. Gathering force throughout is Dobbin's argument that economic practices emerge through distinctly social processes, in which social networks and power resources play roles in the social construction of certain behaviors as rational or optimal. Not only does Dobbin provide a consummate introduction to the field and its history to students approaching the subject for the first time, but he also establishes a schema for interpreting the field based on an understanding of what economic sociology aims to achieve