This review focuses on the intrinsic character of academic work in elementary and secondry schools and the way that work is experienced by teachers and students in classrooms. The first section contains a review of recent research in cognitive psychology on the intellectual demands of the tasks contained in the school curriculum, with particular attention to the inherent complexity of most of the tasks students encounter. The findings of this research are brought to bear on the issue of direct versus indirect instruction. The second section is directed to studies of how academic work is accomplished in classroom environments. Classrooms appear to shape the content of the curriculum in fundamental ways for all students and especially those who find academic work difficult. In addition, the processes that are likely to have the greatest long-term consequences are the most difficult to teach in classrooms. The paper concludes with an analysis of issues related to improving instruction and extending current directions in research on teaching.

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The research program described in this article has focused on the work students do iin classrooms and how that work influences students' thinking about content. The research is based on the premise that the tasks teachers assign determines how students come to understand a curriculum domain. Tasks serve, in other words, as a context for students' thinking during and after instruction. The first section of this article contains an overview of the task model that guided research. The second section provides a summary of findings concerning the properties of students' work in classrooms, with special attention to work in mathematics classes. I conclude with a brief discussion of implications of this research for understanding classroom processes and their effects.Research on teaching in curriculum areas such as mathematics often focuses on the core properties of the content to be learned and on how teachers can design instruction to convey this content to students (Romberg & Carpenter, 1986). The research program described in this article has followed a slightly different path to examine the work students do in classrooms and how that work influences their thinking about content (Doyle, 1983(Doyle, , 1986b. This approach represents an attempt to capture two basic aspects of teaching. At one level, it proposes a treatment theory to account for how students learn from teaching. A fundamental premise of this theory is that the work students do, which is defined in large measure by the tasks teachers assign, determines how they think about a curriculum domain and come to understand its meaning. Of course, other factors, such as students'Requests for reprints should be sent to Walter Doyle, Division of Teaching and Teacher Education, College of Education, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.

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