Student Outcomes and Teacher Effectiveness: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Although researchers believe that teachers are one of the most important school-based resources in
influencing kids’ future academic success and lifetime outcomes, they have struggled to define what
makes a good teacher. The vast body of research on teacher effectiveness is reviewed in this chapter,
highlighting the wide range of approaches used to investigate the basic construct of “teacher quality,”
which includes a variety of factors such as experience, professional. Each of these concepts has its own
set of operationalizing dimensions and methodologies. Research conducted in a single country
(especially in the United States) is separated from research that is truly comparative. Despite a large
body of study on the subject of teacher quality, there isn't much evidence that teacher attributes (such
as experience and knowledge) have an impact on student outcomes. For the effect of teacher support
on learning opportunities, there is a smaller but more substantial set of findings. Teacher experience
(measured by years of teaching), teacher professional knowledge (measured by education and self-
reported preparation to teach mathematics), and teacher chance to learn may all be linked to improved
student accomplishment (measured by time on mathematics and content coverage). The foundation is
laid by these factors.

Keywords

A chance to learn

Education for Teacher

Experience as a Teacher

Quality of Teachers

International Mathematics and Science Research

Defining Teacher Effectiveness

One of the most important school-based resources in determining pupils’ future academic success and
lifetime outcomes, according to researchers, is teachers (Chetty et al. 2014; Rivkin et al. 2005; Rockoff
2004). As a result, there has been a lot of focus on how to make teachers more successful so that
students may learn more effectively. Teacher effectiveness, according to Goe (2007) and others, is
defined as the rate at which students’ learning improves, as evaluated by standardized test scores.
Students taught by highly effective teachers, as measured by the student growth percentile (SGPs) and
value-added measures (VAMs), were more likely to go to college, earn more money, live in higher-
income neighborhoods, save more money for retirement, and have fewer children during their
adolescent years, according to Chetty et al. Because a highly effective teacher has the capacity to make a
substantial difference in the lives of their pupils, it is critical that researchers and policymakers
understand the factors that influence a teacher’s performance. However, as we’ll see later in this study,
research on the relationship between certain teacher traits and student accomplishment has yielded
inconsistent results (Wayne and Youngs 2003). We look at these findings in this chapter, concentrating
on the three primary types of teacher effectiveness that have been defined and studied in the research
literature: teacher experience, teacher knowledge, and teacher behavior. It is important to note that
much of the current body of research is based on studies conducted in the United States, and that the
relevance of such national research to other contexts is still a matter of debate.

Experience as a Teacher

The amount of years a teacher has worked as a classroom teacher is referred to as a teacher’s
experience. There is a strong link between teacher experiences and student accomplishment, according
to numerous research (Wayne and Youngs 2003). Researchers in North Carolina, for example,
discovered that teacher experience was positively associated to student achievement in both reading
and mathematics, using data from 4000 teachers (Clotfelter et al. 2006). The association between
teacher experience and student achievement was most obvious for students at the secondary level,
according to Rice (2003). Teachers’ experience had a cumulative influence on student results, according
to other research in schools in the United States by Wiswall (2013), Papay and Kraft (2015), and Ladd
and Sorenson (2017), as well as a Dutch twin study by Gerritsen et al. (2014).

Professional Experience as a Teacher

The term “professional knowledge” relates to a teacher’s knowledge of their subject matter, curricular,
and pedagogical skills (Collinson 1999). A teacher’s professional expertise is influenced by his or her
undergraduate degrees, college attended, graduate courses completed, and opportunities for on-the-
job training, also known as professional development (Collinson 1999; Rice 2003; Wayne and Youngs
2003). Darling-Hammond (2000) argued that after controlling for student poverty and language status,
measures of teacher preparation and certification were by far the strongest correlates of student
achievement in reading and mathematics in the United States’ 1993–1994 Schools and Staffing Survey
(SASS) and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data sets.

Research on the impact of teacher advanced degrees, subject specializations, and certification on
academic achievement has indeed been mixed, with many studies (Aaronson et al. 2007; Blomeke et al.
2016; Hanushek and Luque 2003; Harris and Sass 2011; Luschei and Chudgar 2011) indicating that there
are insufficient, inaccurate, or non-significant relationships. Teacher degrees, as well as Woessman’s
(2003) student-level analysis of several nations, were found to be connected to student results in several
worldwide studies comparing country means (Akiba et al. 2007; Gustaffsson and Nilson 2016; Montt
2011).

Education for Undergraduates

Wayne and Youngs (2003) discovered three studies in our meta-analysis of teacher quality that revealed
a link between a teacher’s undergraduate institution and the achievement of their future pupils on
standardized tests. Rice (2003) discovered that undergraduate institution and teacher preparation
program selectivity may be associated to student accomplishment for kids at the school level and for
high-poverty children in a complete evaluation of the data on teacher effectiveness qualities. Boyd et al.
(2009) discovered that the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs differed across the board.
Boyd et al. (2009) drew from data based on file analyses, discussions, surveys of teacher preparation
lecturers, surveys of attendees and college grads, and student value-added scores in their study of 31
curricula designed to prepare instructors for the New York City School District.A program’s performance
in training teachers for one subject was correlated with its success in preparing instructors for other
subjects, according to the researchers. Those who concentrated on teaching and the classroom practice,
as well as providing opportunity for teachers to research classroom methods, were also more likely to
be more effective teachers. Finally, they discovered that programs with a final project component (such
as a personal research report or a portfolio presentation) were more likely to train teachers who were
more effective.

The coursework a teacher chooses to take within that program may also have an impact on the success
of their future students. Depending on the subject, these linkages may differ. According to Rice (2003),
subject-specific coursework had a stronger impact on the achievement of future secondary school
students for teachers who taught at the secondary level. Similarly, Goe (2007) discovered that a trainee
teacher’s increase in coursework was favorably associated to the achievement of their future students in
mathematics. Wayne and Youngs (2003), on the other hand, found no indication of a link between a
teacher’s undergraduate coursework and the achievement of future students in history and English in
the meta-analysis they conducted.

Graduate Education

Wilson and Floden (2003) were unable to find consistent connections between a teacher’s level of
education and their pupils’ achievement in an analysis of 14 research. Clotfelter et al. (2006) discovered
that instructors with a master’s degree were associated with worse student achievement in their
assessment of data from 4000 teachers in North Carolina. Teachers with higher degrees and who
completed more courses throughout their education appear to be favorably associated to their
students’ mathematics achievement, particularly in terms of mathematics instruction (Goe 2007).

Certification Status

If a teacher has a teaching certificate, it could also be a good indicator of their effectiveness. In the
United States, where certification systems vary, lower grades usually require certification in many
subjects, while higher grades usually require certification in specific areas, much of the research has
focused on the United States, which uses a variety of certification approaches. With the exception of the
topic of mathematics, where pupils tended to have higher test scores when their teachers held a
standard mathematics certification, Wayne and Youngs (2003) found no obvious association between US
teachers’ certification status and their students’ accomplishment.

Teachers who completed training that resulted in a recognized teaching certificate were more effective
than those who had no dedicated teaching qualifications, according to Darling-Hammond et al. (2005),
who used data from teachers teaching grades four and five and their students in the Houston School
District in Texas in a longitudinal study. Students’ achievement was found to be negatively affected by
teachers with no recognized US certification or non-standard certificates, according to the study’s
findings, even after controlling for student factors such as prior achievement and the teacher’s
education and experience levels. In general, the benefits of teacher certification on student achievement
were substantially stronger than the effects of teacher experience on student accomplishment. Phillips
(2010), on the other hand, discovered that when grade one pupils had teachers with standard
qualification, they had lower mathematical success improvements. In conclusion, the literature on
teacher certification’s impact is still a bit hazy.
Development as a Professional

Many researchers found that teachers’ professional development experiences showed only limited
associations with their effectiveness, although middle- and high-school mathematics teachers who
undertook more content-focused training may be the exception, despite work by Desimone et al. (2002,
2013) suggesting that professional development may influence instructional effectiveness (Blomeke et
al. 2016; Harris and Sass 2011). A meta-analysis conducted by Blank and De Las Alas (2009) indicated
that 16 studies found that professional growth and student accomplishment had significant and
favorable correlations, according to their findings. In terms of mathematics, studies with a pre-post
assessment methodology had an average effect size of 0.21 standard deviations.

When Wallace (2009) used structural equation modeling to analyze data from six data sets, two from
the Connecticut and Tennessee Beginning Teacher Preparation Surveys and four from the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) of the US National Center for Education Statistics, she
discovered that professional development had a very small but statistically significant impact on student
achievement. 1.2 additional hours of professional development per year was linked to an increase in
average student scores of 0.62 points for NAEP mathematics data from 2000, and 1.1 additional hours of
professional development per year was linked to an increase in average student scores of 0.24 points for
NAEP reading data from the year 2000. When professional development was mediated by teacher
practice, Wallace (2009) found that it had a moderate impact on teacher practice and a minor impact on
student achievement.

Teacher Content Knowledge

Experience and education, for example, may be inaccurate proxies for teacher content knowledge;
nevertheless, content knowledge is difficult to measure directly. Teacher content expertise, on the other
hand, is increasingly being linked to student learning, according to a growing body of research. It’s worth
noting that there’s a big difference between a subject’s general content knowledge (CK) and a subject’s
pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), both of which might have an impact on student results in their
own way (Baumert et al. 2010).

Higher teacher cognitive skills in mathematics are linked to higher student scores, according to studies
conducted in the United States (Chingos and Peterson 2011; Clotfelter et al. 2006; Constantine et al.
2009; Hill et al. 2005; Shuls and Trivitt 2015). According to a study conducted by Hanushek et al. that
used data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC),
positive associations between teacher content knowledge and student outcomes were found in studies
conducted in Germany (Baumert et al. 2010) and Peru (Metzler and Woessman 2012). (2018). Even
though these findings aren’t general, other research in the US (Blazar 2015; Garet and colleagues 2016;
Rockoff et al. 2011) have failed to uncover a statistically significant link between teacher content
knowledge and student learning.

All of the studies we’ve looked at employed some kind of direct test to see how well teachers
understood the topic. Self-reported teacher preparation to teach mathematics topics is an alternate
approach of measuring mathematics teacher content knowledge. Many questions have been included in
both TIMSS and the IEA’s Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M, which
was done in 2007–2008) asking instructors to report on their preparedness to teach specific topics.
Other studies have found a link between instructional quality (Blomeke et al. 2016), as well as content
knowledge and preparation (Schmidt et al. 2017), suggesting that instructional quality may have an
indirect effect on student learning, despite the fact that Luschei and Chudgar (2011) and Gustafsson and
Nilson (2016) found a weak direct link between these items and student achievement across countries.
Other studies have found a link between instructional quality (Blomeke et al. 2016).

Opportunities to Learn and Teacher Behaviors

Although the impact of teacher attributes (experience, education, and teacher preparedness to teach)
on student outcomes is still unknown, there is a considerably stronger link between student
accomplishment and teacher behavior (instructional time and material), particularly behavior-related
content. Students’ achievement was linked to classroom opportunity to learn (OTL), which was narrowly
defined as exposure to instructional content in the classroom, according to Schmidt et al. (2001).
Schmidt et al. (2015) found a strong link between OTL and mathematics literacy across 62 different
educational systems in a later analysis utilizing student-level PISA data. National politicians have
acknowledged the importance of instructional content, which has aided in motivating standards-based
reforms, such as the Common Core State Standards in the United States, to increase student
accomplishment (Common Core Standards Initiative 2018). We discovered, however, that there was
little evidence on whether aligned teacher instructional content helped student learning; the one study
we were able to find revealed that such alignment only had extremely modest connections with student
mathematics results (Polikoff and Porter 2014). According to student data, instructional time (also
known as classroom time on a particular subject) appears to be linked to math achievement (Cattaneo
et al. 2016; Jerrim et al. 2017; Lavy 2015; Rivkin and Schiman 2015; Woessman 2003).

Conclusion

The vast corpus of research on the relationship between student accomplishment and teacher qualities
and actions is just scratched by this survey of the literature. The relationship between easily measured
instructor attributes, such as experience and education, and student results in mathematics remains
controversial, whether evaluating US-based, international, or the (limited) number of comparison
research. There is more data to support the impact of instructor behaviors on student accomplishment,
such as instructional content and time on task. Our goal was to incorporate all these factors into a
comparative model across countries, with the aim of determining what an international cross-national
study like TIMSS could reveal about the influence of teachers on student outcomes in mathematics. The
analysis that follows draws on the existing body of literature on teacher effectiveness, which identified
key teacher factors that may be associated with higher student achievement: teacher experience,
teacher professional knowledge (measured by education and self-reported preparation to teach
mathematics), and teacher provision of opportunity to learn (time on mathematics and content
coverage).

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