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Cognitive Abilities and Educational Outcomes pp 189–204Cite as

Empirical Puzzles on Effective Teachers: U.S. Research

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Part of the book series: Methodology of Educational Measurement and Assessment ((MEMA))

Abstract

This chapter addresses the knowledge base on selection and evaluation of effective teachers using recent empirical literature from the United States. It finds that the traditional criteria of teacher licensing, educational credentials, and teaching experience show extremely weak relationships to gains (value-added) in student achievement. Combining classroom observations and measures of teacher value-added seem to hold promise in identifying productive teachers among those already employed, but lack applicability in the initial selection of teachers. Differences among teacher training programs in teacher effectiveness are surprisingly small relative to variance within programs. Issues of how to select teachers and how to reward them for their contributions to student and school productivity remain contested without solid evidence to resolve them.

Chapter for a festschrift in honor of Professor Jan-Eric Gustafsson, University of Goteborg. Previous version presented at a conference on “Teacher Competence and the Teaching Profession” Sponsored by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and Wenner-Gren Foundations/KVA, September 10–13, 2014, Stockholm.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is important to note that many studies only look for a statistically significant relation in which the result was unlikely to be found by chance. But in the context of validating a predictive relation between a criterion and outcome, the magnitude of the relationship is important, not just its rejection of a chance occurrence. I have used the term “little relationship” to characterize situations in which there is no statistically significant relation or the relationship is statistically significant, but trivial (suggesting little impact). For example, one of the largest apparent effects of certification is found in Clotfelter et al. (2007). But the difference in student achievement between teachers who have met the full license requirement and those who lack the requirement is only about 2 percentiles on a standardized metric of achievement or less than 1 percentile if one makes an adjustment for fadeout of achievement effects based upon studies of that phenomenon. Also see the debate in Goldhaber and Brewer (2000, 2001) and Darling-Hammond et al. (2001).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA

    Henry M. Levin

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  1. Henry M. Levin
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Correspondence to Henry M. Levin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg Dept. of Education and Special Education, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Monica Rosén

  2. Dept. of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg , Gothenburg, Sweden

    Kajsa Yang Hansen

  3. Dept. of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg Dept. of Education and Special Education, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Ulrika Wolff

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Levin, H.M. (2017). Empirical Puzzles on Effective Teachers: U.S. Research. In: Rosén, M., Yang Hansen, K., Wolff, U. (eds) Cognitive Abilities and Educational Outcomes. Methodology of Educational Measurement and Assessment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43473-5_10

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