Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Preliminary Findings Research Report

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Full report

Policy Brief

What We’re Learning So Far:


• In every grade and subject, a teacher’s past track record of value-added is among the strongest predictors of their students’ achievement gains in other classes and academic years. A teacher’s value-added fluctuates from year-to-year and from class-to-class, as succeeding cohorts of students move through their classrooms. However, that volatility is not so large as to undercut the usefulness of value-added as an indicator (imperfect, but still informative) of future performance.

• The teachers who lead students to achievement gains in one year or in one class tend to do so in other years and other classes.

• Teachers with high value-added on state tests tend to promote deeper conceptual understanding as well.

• Many are concerned that high value-added teachers are simply coaching children to do well on state tests. In the long run, it would do students little good to score well on state tests if they fail to understand key concepts. However, in our analysis so far, that does not seem to be the case. Indeed, the teachers who are producing gains on the state tests are generally also promoting deeper conceptual understanding among their students. In mathematics, for instance, after adjusting for measurement error, the correlation between teacher effects on the state math test and on the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics was moderately large, .54.

• Teachers have larger effects on math achievement than on achievement in reading or English Language Arts, at least as measured on state assessments.

• Many researchers have reported a similar result: teachers seem to have a larger influence on math performance than English Language Arts performance. A common interpretation is that families have more pro-found effects on children’s reading and verbal performance than teachers. However, the finding may also be due to limitations of the current state ELA tests (which typically consist of multiple-choice questions of reading comprehension). When using the Stanford 9 Open-Ended assessment (which requires youth to provide written responses), we find teacher effects comparable to those found in mathematics. We will be studying this question further in the coming months, by studying teacher effects on different types of test items. However, if future work confirms our initial findings with the open-ended assessment, it would imply that the new literacy assessments, which are being designed to assess the new common core standards, may be more sensitive to instructional effects than current state ELA tests.

• Student perceptions of a given teacher’s strengths and weaknesses are consistent across the different groups of students they teach. Moreover, students seem to know effective teaching when they experience it: student perceptions in one class are related to the achievement gains in other classes taught by the same teacher. Most important are students’ perception of a teacher’s ability to control a classroom and to challenge students with rigorous work.

• While student feedback is widely used in higher education, it is rare for elementary and secondary schools to ask youth about their experiences in the classroom. Nevertheless, soliciting student feedback is poten-tially attractive for a number of reasons: the questions themselves enjoy immediate legitimacy with teachers, school leaders and parents; it is an inexpensive way to supplement other more costly indicators, such as classroom observations; and the questionnaires can be extended to non-tested grades and subjects quickly. Our preliminary results suggest that the student questionnaires would be a valuable complement to other performance measures.

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