if your child raves about having a great teacher—or rails about a bad one—believe it.
That’s the finding from a new report that gives some research backing to an idea that many have long believed to be true—that students readily recognize the standout teachers as well as the classroom duds in their school. The study found that student assessments of teacher quality line up remarkably well with quantitative measurements looking at which teachers produce the greatest learning gains among students on standardized tests.
The report, issued in December, is part of a $45 million project funded by the Seattle-based Gates Foundation. The Measures of Effective Teaching initiative aims to identify multiple, reliable ways to identify superior teaching. It is part of a wave of research driven by the growing consensus that teacher effectiveness is the single biggest school-based factor that affects student learning.
The findings on student evaluation of their teachers come from more than 2,500 grade 4-8 classrooms in five school districts across the country. The students were asked to rate their teachers on such variables as their ability to control classroom behavior, how much they challenge students, and how well they explain materials, make lessons interesting, or welcome student participation. The study then looked at the relationship between these qualitative assessments by students and “value-added” scores that gauge how much academic progress students make under different teachers. Value-added assessments take into account a student’s past performance in an effort to tease out the degree of progress that can be attributed to particular teachers.
The bottom-line finding: “Students know when they experience effective teaching,” says Ron Ferguson, the Harvard researcher who developed the student surveys. “Students can tell us something valuable that helps us predict how much they will learn.”
While the study may broadly confirm the widely held belief that students know good teaching when they see it, Ferguson says when people are asked what specific teacher qualities are the strongest predictors of achievement gains, “they often get it exactly wrong.”
His survey puts questions into categories he calls “the 7 Cs,” grouping questions together under the headings of care, control, clarify, challenge, captivate, confer, and consolidate. Ferguson says many people believe the best teachers are those who show they care a lot for their students, but this turns out to be one of the weaker predictors of student gains. The qualities most strongly related to student achievement were a teacher’s ability to exercise control over the classroom and to challenge students.
Students who said teachers spent a lot of time having them practice for state tests did perform better on the exams. But that measure was one of the weaker predictors of student achievement gains, suggesting that a rich and challenging curriculum actually leads to bigger gains than a narrow “teach to the test” approach.
Standardized tests, from which teacher value-added scores are derived, are only given in certain subjects and at certain grade levels. That’s one reason why researchers are excited about the findings on student evaluations, which can be gathered from classrooms where standardized state tests aren’t administered.
A Boston student group spent three years campaigning to have students evaluate teachers in the city’s public schools. Last year, the school committee and Boston Teachers Union signed off on the idea. The evaluations are supposed to be given out during the current year in every high school class. Although the results go only to the classroom teacher and are not part of the teacher’s formal evaluation, students from the Boston Student Advisory Council are hoping to see the evaluations eventually incorporated into the official review of teacher performance. This is a “stepping stone, a beginning point,” says Maria Ortiz of the school department’s Office of Family and Student Engagement, who worked with the student group on the effort.
The Gates Foundation study also looked at the consistency of value-added ratings of teachers. The report says a teacher’s value-added score with a particular class strongly predicted how they would score with a different classroom of students or how they scored in prior years, suggesting it is a reliable gauge of teaching effectiveness.
Evaluating teachers based on student achievement test scores has become a centerpiece of many reform efforts, including the federal Race to the Top initiative, which requires that the states receiving money under the $4.3 billion project revamp teacher evaluation policies so that student achievement scores are “a significant factor” in the reviews.
Most teachers’ unions have objected to the idea of linking student test scores to teacher evaluations. In December, however, the Massachusetts Teachers Association announced its support for a system that uses test scores, along with other measures, in teacher evaluations.
