Shazma Nandwani March 9, 2014 PAPER REVIEW 1.

The Effects of Teacher Education Level, Teaching Experience, And Teaching Behaviours On Student Science Achievement Zhang (2008) examined two objectives in this study. First, to investigate the extent to which two attributes, teacher education and experience, influence middle school science achievement. Second to explore whether a third variable or set of variables, teaching behavior in the class room , mediate or moderate the relationship between the two attributes and student performance in science. This study utilized archival data collected during an evaluation of a professional development intervention study in the four middle schools (great 6 through 8) in a large urban school district in Uth between Fall 2005 and Spring 2008. The sample in this study was comprised of 12 science teachers and 655 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth- grade students. The techniques used to analyze the data is two fold, first : descriptive statistics of central tendency of student science achievement score, dispersion for other important predictor variables. Second : multilevel modeling was conducted to access the effects of teacher education, years of teaching experience, and teaching behavior on students science achievement. The results of this study highlighted effective teaching behaviors mediate the relationship between teacher education and experience with student outcomes, indicating that teacher behaviors carry the most weight in terms of impacting those ultimate outcomes. Second, teacher experience played a smaller role in terms of resulting in high student achievement. Third an advanced degree in science or education impacts students outcome, but only as a function of how long the teacher has been in their career. It is recommended that more research needs to be done to find ways to help teachers with advanced training maintain their level of effectiveness with students over the course of their career, not just in the early stages.