Wednesday August 15, 2012
This week Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week took a look at six research studies on using value-added data to evaluate teacher preparation programs in his blog Can Value-Added Be Used to Evaluate Teacher Preparation? Scholars Weigh In. We’ve chosen two findings from the studies to share.
One study from the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research titled Teacher Preparation and Student Achievement found that programs who provide more oversight of student teaching experiences produce significantly more effective teachers. The opportunity to engage in actual teaching, as well as to review and use curricula that will be used in their future classrooms, was shown to increase student test score gains in both math and ELA. “Teacher preparation that focuses more on the work of the classroom and provides opportunities for teachers to study what they will be doing produces teachers who are more effective during their first year of teaching,” researchers write. This resonates with us at UTRU. A cornerstone of rigorous residency preparation is to have extended clinical experience in the district where a new teacher will work, and to use that classroom time to develop the resident’s ability to understand, apply and modify curricula based on frequent assessments of student learning, all in the context of the districts’ standards and curricula.
Sawchuk also notes that several researchers stress the difficulty in determining whether the effects observed are a function of the training graduates receive or of the population of teacher candidates the program attracts. This is an interesting challenge for residencies to think about as we strive to improve both program quality and recruitment and selection processes. What measures is your UTR using to determine the impact of recruitment and selection strategies, and how do you determine which selection criteria may be contributing factors in resident performance?
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