Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?
Jonah E. Rockoff,
Brian A. Jacob,
Thomas J. Kane and
Douglas O. Staiger
No 14485, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
Research on the relationship between teachers' characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. However, most research has examined a relatively small set of characteristics that are collected by school administrators in order to satisfy legal requirements and set salaries. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument. Individually, we find that only a few of these predictors have statistically significant relationships with student and teacher outcomes. However, when all of these variables are combined into two primary factors summarizing cognitive and non-cognitive teacher skills, we find that both factors have a modest and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores. These results suggest that, while there may be no single factor that can predict success in teaching, using a broad set of measures can help schools improve the quality of their teachers.
JEL-codes: I21 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)
Published as Jonah E. Rockoff & Brian A. Jacob & Thomas J. Kane & Douglas O. Staiger, 2011. "Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 6(1), pages 43-74, January.
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14485.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One? (2011) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14485
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14485
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().