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Teacher Effectiveness

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Although many personal, family, and neighborhood factors contribute to a student's academic performance, a large body of research suggests that—among school-related factors—teachers matter most. RAND researchers examine and evaluate methods of measuring teacher effectiveness, as well as the critical relationship between teacher effectiveness and student achievement.

Research Brief

How Teacher Effectiveness Spills Over into Other Classrooms

May 28, 2019

Teachers' effectiveness ripples out beyond their own students and affects the experiences of their pupils' future peers. Ignoring these "spillover" effects underestimates a teacher's value by at least 30 percent.
Research Brief

Results from the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching Initiative

Feb 11, 2019

A multiyear effort aimed at increasing students' access to effective teaching failed to achieve its goals for improved student achievement and graduation. However, the participating school districts and charter management organizations did implement better measures of teaching effectiveness.

Explore Teacher Effectiveness

Commentary

Teachers Have Lost Out on Professional Development. Summer Programs Could Help

For thousands of teachers across the United States, 2020 was a year of uncertainty. Many lacked access to their usual professional learning activities. Summer programs for students that also offer learning opportunities for teachers might help make up for lost time.

Mar 5, 2021
Journal Article

Relationships Between Teaching Practices and Student Outcomes

This chapter explores how the three domains of mathematics teaching explored in prior chapters are related to three different student outcome measures.

Feb 17, 2021
Journal Article

The Consistency of Composite Ratings of Teacher Effectiveness: Evidence From New Mexico

We estimate the consistency of composite ratings of teacher quality from New Mexico's teacher evaluation system from 2015 to 2016.

Feb 17, 2021
Research Brief

How Can Teachers Make the Most of Professional Learning in the Summer?

This brief summarizes an examination of the potential value of academic summer programs for students that also offer professional learning opportunities for teachers.

Jan 12, 2021
Report

The Promise of Summer as a Time for Teacher Professional Learning: Findings from a National Survey and Implications from the BellXcel Program

This report presents data from the first nationally representative survey of teachers about their summer professional learning opportunities and data from a descriptive study of BellXcel Summer, an academic summer program model for students.

Jan 12, 2021
Journal Article

Examining Design and Statistical Power for Planning Cluster Randomized Trials Aimed at Improving Student Science Achievement and Science Teacher Outcomes

In this study, we consider strategies to maximize the efficiency of the study design when both student and teacher effects are of primary interest.

Nov 25, 2020
Research Brief

The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching: A Comparison of School Outcomes

RAND researchers study the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative and find associations between school improvement and staff perceptions of school leaders' behaviors, staff cohesion, and factors outside schools' control.

Sep 21, 2020
Report

Variation in Improvement Among Schools in the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching

RAND researchers investigate factors that might be associated with positive student outcomes for schools that improved during the six years of the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative.

Sep 21, 2020
Journal Article

Not Where You Start, but How Much You Grow: An Addendum to the Coleman Report

The Coleman Report (1966) first suggested that schools play a relatively small part in shaping students' achievement. The results in this paper suggest a need to update this conventional wisdom.

Jul 28, 2020
Report

How Are Educators Teaching and Leading Through the Pandemic?

U.S. teachers and principals shifted quickly to support students with distance learning during the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis. But unfortunately, the pandemic is likely to make existing inequalities worse.

Jun 22, 2020
Journal Article

Priming the Leadership Pipeline: School Performance and Climate Under an Urban School Leadership Residency Program

This study examines school climate and student achievement trends under an ambitious school leadership residency program in an urban school district.

Jun 16, 2020
Report

Writing Instruction in U.S. Classrooms: Diverging Perspectives for Teachers Across Content Areas

This American Educator Panels Data Note provides insights into secondary teachers' perceptions of their preparedness to teach and assess writing skills and their levels of support in the classroom.

May 14, 2020
Report

Using Data to Support the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching Initiative: Data Collection, Metric and Dashboard Creation, and Lessons Learned

The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative was a multiyear effort to improve student outcomes by increasing access to effective teaching. The authors discuss challenges in measuring effectiveness and how the team addressed them.

Mar 5, 2020
Report

Stakeholder Feedback Surveys as Indicators of Teaching Effectiveness

According to the author, stakeholder surveys address a broad range of topics related to school and classroom climate. Some types of surveys can be used for teacher-level feedback.

Dec 4, 2019
Report

Beyond Achievement: How Teachers Affect Outcomes Other than Test Scores

Research shows that teachers matter for both test and nontest score outcomes. Teachers who excel at raising test scores do not necessarily excel at improving other outcomes.

Dec 4, 2019
Report

Student Growth Percentiles 101: Using Relative Ranks in Student Test Scores to Help Measure Teaching Effectiveness

The author defines student growth percentiles (SGPs) and discusses how they are used to rank student test-score growth compared with peers and to produce a score for a teacher.

Dec 4, 2019
Report

Teachers' Broad Impact: Understanding How Teachers Influence Students They Do Not Teach

The author discusses the potential ways that teachers can affect students whom they do not teach and how research suggests that a teacher's indirect reach could account for a large proportion of his or her overall contribution to student learning.

Dec 4, 2019
Report

Teachers Matter: Understanding Teachers' Impact on Student Achievement

The author articulates how research suggests that teachers are important to student achievement and how statistical methods can provide valuable but imprecise estimates of teacher effectiveness.

Dec 4, 2019
Report

Value-Added Modeling 101: Using Student Test Scores to Help Measure Teaching Effectiveness

The author discusses the use of value-added models (VAMs) to estimate teacher contribution to student progress, account for students' prior characteristics, and enable relative judgments, as well as the limitations of VAMs.

Dec 4, 2019
Report

Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: Understanding Common, Uncommon, and Combined Methods

The author describes the three most-common methods for measuring teacher effectiveness in the United States and discusses the importance of carefully considering the ways that measures are combined to create an overall index.

Dec 4, 2019

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RAND Topic:
Teacher Effectiveness

Research conducted by

RAND Education and Labor