What Large-Scale, Survey Research Tells Us about Teacher Effects on Student Achievement: Insights from the Prospects Study of Elementary Schools

By Brian Rowan, Richard Correnti, Robert J. Miller. Teachers College Record, 2002

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This paper discusses conceptual and methodological issues that arise when educational researchers use data from large-scale, survey research to examine the effects of teachers and teaching on student achievement. Using data from Prospects: The Congressionally Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity 1991–1994, we show that researchers’ use of different statistical models has led to widely varying interpretations about the overall magnitude of teacher effects on student achievement. However, we conclude that in well-specified models of academic growth, teacher effects on elementary school students’ growth in reading and mathematics achievement are substantial (with d-type effect sizes ranging from .72 to .85). We also conclude that various characteristics of teachers and their teaching account for these effects, including variation among teachers in professional preparation and content knowledge, use of teaching routines, and patterns of content coverage, with effect sizes for variables measuring these characteristics of teachers and their teaching showing d-type effect sizes in the range of .10. The paper concludes with an assessment of the current state of the art in large-scale, survey research on teaching. Here, we conclude that survey researchers must simultaneously improve their measures of instruction while paying careful attention to issues of causal inference.

Subfields: Education, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62eba3e6963824fbcded5d3b96b0c35419baa47b

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Citations in the corpus

Learning Mathematics for Teaching: Results from California's Mathematics Professional Development Institutes (2004, background): “…results from a covariate adjustment model, predicting teachers' posttest scores from pretest scores plus institute characteristics, and observe that Rowan, Correnti, and Miller (2002) argue that in their data, this model underrepresents the influence of inputs on outcomes in comparison to a growth…”
Improving Classroom Quality: Teacher Influences and Experimental Impacts of the 4Rs Program. (2010, background): “Ryan, Gheen, & Midgley, 1998), their interest and ability in forming close relationships with their students (Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Ladd & Burgess, 1999; Pianta, Steinberg, & Rollins, 1995), their experience of stress associated with individual student behavior and feelings of job burnout overall (A”
Value-Added Models and the Measurement of Teacher Quality (2006, background): “One exception is Rowan, Correnti, and Miller (2002), who include student-specific effects in the context of a hierarchical linear model (HLM) framework.”
Attribution Error and the Quest for Teacher Quality (2010, unknown): “Rowan, Correnti, and Miller (2002) correlated elementary teachers’ effectiveness in mathematics versus reading and found correlations ranging from .3 to .47 across the elementary grade levels.”
Teacher Characteristics and Student Achievement Gains: A Review (2003, background): “…researchers generally agree that (a) prior achievement test scores and (b) student background characteristics are required in order to minimally reduce the potential for alternative explanations of student achievement differences (see generally Ehrenberg et al., 2001; Ferguson, 1996; Rowan, 2002).”
Teacher Recruitment and Retention: A Review of the Recent Empirical Literature (2006, methodology): “Shen (1997), using data from the Schools and Staffing Survey of 1990–1991 and the Teacher Follow-up Survey of 1991–1992, found that teachers who stayed in the same school from 1991 to 1992 were more likely than those who did not stay in the same school to perceive that they had influence over school”
Models for Value-Added Modeling of Teacher Effects (2004, background): “[See (Rowan et al., 2002) and (Puma, Karweit, Price, Ricciuti, Thompson, & Vaden-Kiernan, 1997) for details on the Prospects data.]”
Teacher Pay For Performance: Experimental Evidence from the Project on Incentives in Teaching (2010, background): “In addition, teachers and others have expressed concerns about negative effects of pay for performance on collegiality (Milanowski & Gallagher, 2000; Kellor, 2005), particularly in light of research that suggests the importance of collegiality and trust among school staff in promoting student learni”
Making Sense of the Links: Professional Development, Teacher Practices, and Student Achievement (2009, methodology): “Prior studies that measured teacher effects on student mathematics achievement indicated that at least 21% of the variation in student outcomes was related to variation in teacher effectiveness (Goldhaber & Brewer, 1997; Nye et al., 2005; Rowan et al., 2002; Sanders & Rivers, 1996).”