posted on December 21, 2010 16:45
A new study, financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has found that measuring teacher effectiveness may be as simple as asking the students.
Students were given carefully designed questionnaires, asking a variety of questions about the type of learning environment that their teacher created in the classroom. The results from the survey were then compared with a previous study, which ranked teachers using "value-added modeling," a statistical measure of teacher effectiveness based on students' test scores
The researchers found a correlation between how the students rated their teachers, and the teachers' scores determined by value-added modeling. As the designer of the questionnaire summarizes, "kids know effective teaching when they experience it."
Click here to read this article.
Published by Sam Dillon for the New York Times, December 10, 2010.