Evaluation of Departmentalized Instruction in Elementary Schools

Helping schools more efficiently use their resources to improve student achievement and teacher retention is a longstanding but increasingly important priority for education policymakers. Departmentalizing instruction is one potential strategy to address these goals in elementary schools. Assigning upper elementary grade teachers to teach their strongest subjects to multiple classes (“departmentalizing”), rather than teaching all subjects to a single class (“self-contained instruction”), could have multiple benefits. To learn more about the potential benefits and challenges of this strategy, this study examined the experiences of 90 schools that either voluntarily switched to departmentalized instruction or continued teaching all subjects to a single class in 4th and 5th grades for two years beginning in fall 2019.