By considering students’ opinions about their teachers, researchers may be able to pinpoint the qualities that define effective teaching practices, according to an ongoing study by Dartmouth economics professor Douglas Staiger and researchers from the RAND Corporation, a policy research and analysis organization. The study — funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — will analyze data collected from seven urban school districts throughout the country as part of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, which aims to reconcile the conflict between quantitative and qualitative reviews of teacher quality, according to its website.
The project — which includes districts ranging from Denver to New York City — is monitoring 3,000 third through twelfth grade teachers over a period of two years to create an improved system for judging teachers’ performances in schools, according to the its website.
Early findings indicate that student perceptions of teacher effectiveness are strong predictors of student success and must be considered when evaluating best teaching practices, according to Staiger.
“If you look at teachers with good ratings on classroom management, their students do much better on end-of-year tests,” he said. “Many people haven’t yet focused on student perception as a useful dimension.”
The project combines a variety of teacher evaluation methods in order to discover what classroom practices are associated with high student achievement, according to Staiger.
Both teachers and their unions nationwide have been cooperative with the project, which relies on volunteers to allow classroom observation, Staiger said. Various districts have received letters from unions praising the project and urging teachers to participate, he said.
“It will lead to meaningful teacher evaluation, meaningful for everyone.” Staiger said. “Teachers will learn more about what works. In large districts teachers often get little meaningful feedback.”
Unlike previous studies of teacher effectiveness, which emphasized student test scores, the project combines quantitative student achievement measures with data from classroom observations and detailed student surveys, Staiger said.
“People certainly have used value-added measures before and people have certainly used classroom observation before, but this project is unique in that it brings together these approaches,” New York U. education professor Sean Corcoran said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
In its second year, the study will also address the problem of equitable class distribution by randomly assigning students to participating teachers, Staiger said.
“There’s a big concern that all of these measures of teacher effectiveness have this bias in them, that they’re not measuring how good teachers are, but the quality of the kids they’re getting,” he said.
Interest in designing a standard for teacher evaluation has risen along with a “push for higher student achievement” and the difficulty of removing poor-quality teachers, education professor Michael Harris said. Harris previously served as superintendent of the Lebanon, N.H., school district for 11 years, from 1999 through 2010.
The impending reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act has also left districts seeking improved teacher evaluation methods, according to a College press release. Currently, much of the information available about teacher performance comes from subjective observation by school principals, Harris said.
The project, which began in the fall of 2009, will continue until fall of this year, according to Staiger. Full first-year results will be released in spring 2011.
The project has not reached any definitive conclusions, due to the ongoing process of compiling data, according to the preliminary finding policy brief released in December.
Staiger said that the early findings are “very exciting,” but cautioned readers against jumping to conclusions.
“This is a very preliminary report,” he said. “We have other data we haven’t even started to look at yet.”