Teacher Incentives for Student Performance Study

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Teacher Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence From the Project on Incentives in Teaching.

This study examines whether offering financial incentives to teachers of fifth- through eighth-grade math students improves their students’ achievement on the math section of the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program. The study found that students with math teachers who were offered financial incentives performed no better or worse than students with teachers who were not offered incentives

The What Works Clearinghouse Quick Review does not consider these results to be conclusive because the groups of students compared may have differed before the intervention. The WWC determined that the research described in this report does not meet WWC evidence standards.

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Music: Cause or Symptom of Teenage Depression?

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Adolescents who spend more time listening to music are far more likely to have major depressive disorder, while young people who spend more time reading books are far less likely to have such a diagnosis, according to a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study published in the April edition of the journal Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

The findings add to the growing body of research linking emotional health to media exposure. The study was unique in that it was one of the first to measure media exposure using an intensive "real-life" methodology called ecological momentary assessment, in which the behaviors of study participants are repeatedly sampled in real time. The method is more reliable than standard surveys and helped researchers recognize this large association between exposure to music and depression, said Brian Primack, M.D., Ed.M., M.S., assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Pitt's School of Medicine, who led the study.

The study involved 106 adolescent participants, 46 of whom were diagnosed with major depressive disorder. Researchers called the participants as many as 60 times during five extended weekends over two months and asked them to report if they were using any of six types of media: television or movies, music, video games, Internet, magazines or newspapers, and books.

The researchers found that young people who were exposed to the most music, compared to those who listened to music the least, were 8.3 times more likely to be depressed. However, compared to those with the least time exposed to books, those who read books the most were one-tenth as likely to be depressed. The other media exposures were not significantly associated with depression.

"At this point, it is not clear whether depressed people begin to listen to more music to escape, or whether listening to large amounts of music can lead to depression, or both. Either way, these findings may help clinicians and parents recognize links between media and depression," Dr. Primack said. "It also is important that reading was associated with less likelihood of depression. This is worth emphasizing because overall in the U.S., reading books is decreasing, while nearly all other forms of media use are increasing."

Major depressive disorder, also referred to as clinical or major depression, is the leading cause of disability in the world. Its onset is common in adolescents and is thought to affect one in 12 teenagers, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Giving teachers bonuses for student achievement undermines student learning

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Recent efforts to improve teacher performance by linking pay to student achievement have failed because such programs often rely on metrics that were never intended to help determine teacher pay, contends Derek Neal, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.

"Many accountability and performance pay systems employ test scores from assessment systems that produce information used not only to determine rewards and punishments for educators, but also to inform the public about progress in student learning," Neal writes in the paper, "The Design of Performance Pay in Education."

These testing systems make it easy, in theory, for policymakers to obtain consistent measures of student and teacher performance over time. But Neal argues that the same testing regimes also make it easy, in practice, for educators to game incentive systems by coaching students for exams rather than teaching them to master subject matter.

"As long as education authorities keep trying to accomplish both of these tasks (measurement and incentive provisions) with one set of assessments, they will continue to fail at both tasks," he adds in the paper, which was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and is a chapter in the upcoming Handbook of Economics of Education.

Although a great deal has been written about the results of pay bonuses for teachers linked to student achievement, few studies have actually examined the design of those programs, Neal said. Working with his own research and that of others on achievement, he explored why many incentive programs are unsuccessful.

In some rare instances, teachers have cheated in response to the pressure of high-stakes tests. In other cases, teachers may avoid instruction that leads to more comprehensive learning while increasing time devoted to activities that prepare students for upcoming assessments. For example, they may decide to skip writing and simply ask students to practice finding grammar mistakes in passages written by others.

In other cases, teacher incentive programs based on student achievement have encouraged teachers to leave schools in which most students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, research shows.

Still, other programs appear to fail because they set the performance standards so high that teachers felt they had little chance winning reward payments by working harder.

Neal writes that education officials should separate the provision of incentives and the measurement of student and educator performance by using separate testing programs for these two tasks. Neal said that reward pay should be attached to the results of assessments that vary enough annually so that they are not predictable, and therefore do not invite coaching. Such assessments may provide little information about whether long-term trends in student achievement are positive or negative, but the results provide enough information for reward pay systems that base yearly bonuses for teachers on the performance of their students relative to students from similar backgrounds in other schools.

Separate assessment systems that involve no stakes for teachers, and thus no incentives for manipulation, should be used to produce measures of student performance over time, Neal contends. This two-system approach would discourage excessive "teaching to the test."

"The designers of assessment-based incentive schemes must take seriously the challenge of designing a series of assessments such that the best response of educators is not to coach, but to teach in ways that build true mastering," Neal said.

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