 the second year). The effect of the programme on teacher evaluation ratings and teacher retention was not significant, although more teachers in the programme group left after two years than in the control group.
Source: Impacts of the retired mentors for new teachers program (REL 2017–225) (March 2017), US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Central.
The edTPA is an assessment in the US, introduced in 2013, that evaluates prospective teachers’ classroom performance. It is used by more than 600 teacher education programmes in 40 states, and passing it is a requirement for licensure in 7 states. In an attempt to discern whether the test can accurately determine if teacher candidates who achieve higher scores on this test help their students better than lower-scoring candidates, The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) conducted the first independent study of edTPA, and found mixed results.
The study followed 2,300 teacher candidates in Washington State who took the edTPA in 2014. Their scores were correlated with their students’ standardised test scores in reading and maths. The study found that new teachers who passed the edTPA on their first try increased their students’ reading achievement scores more than new teachers who didn’t pass edTPA on their first attempt. There were no differences regarding the effects on students’ math scores.
The authors discuss the complicated implications of these findings for policy and practice. For example, they state that new teachers who fail the test the first time may ultimately become high-performing teachers, and warn of screening them out of the workforce.
Source: Evaluating Prospective Teachers: Testing the Predictive Validity of the edTPA (2016), National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER)
The Learning Policy Institute has published a review of research into teacher effectiveness as teachers become more experienced. The review takes advantage of advances in research methods and data systems that have allowed researchers to more accurately answer this question. Specifically, by including teacher fixed effects in their analyses, researchers have been able to compare a teacher with multiple years of experience to that same teacher when he or she had fewer years of experience.
The report reviews 30 studies published within the last 15 years that analyse the effect of teaching experience on student outcomes in the United States. The review concludes that:
- Teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career. Gains in teacher effectiveness associated with experience are most steep in teachers’ initial years, but continue to be significant as teachers reach the second, and often third, decades of their careers.
- As teachers gain experience, their students not only learn more, as measured by standardised tests, they are also more likely to do better on other measures of success, such as school attendance.
- Teachers’ effectiveness increases at a greater rate when they teach in a supportive and collegial working environment, and when they accumulate experience in the same grade level, subject, or district.
- More experienced teachers support greater student learning for their colleagues and the school as a whole, as well as for their own students.
Source: Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? A Review of the Research (2016), Learning Policy Institute.
Removing low-performing teachers can improve outcomes for students, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The study looked at the effect of IMPACT, a performance assessment and incentive system introduced in schools in Washington, DC. IMPACT evaluates all teachers every year based on multiple measures of effectiveness (eg, clearly described standards, several teacher observations by different observers, and student outcomes). Teac