National Center for Teacher Effectiveness

Project Status: Current
Focus Area: Teacher Effectiveness
Location: Massachusetts, Georgia & Washington, D.C.

How are multiple measures used in teacher evaluation related to one another and student learning? 

In July 2009, NCTE commenced a six-year effort to join disparate strands of education research, and develop a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of how to measure teacher and teaching effectiveness. NCTE is developing valid measures of effective mathematics teaching to be shared with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. The measures may help target and plan teacher training, and improve teacher observation and feedback processes. 

There are three key strands of the work:

  • The core study Developing Measures of Effective Mathematics Teaching, which included a extensive data collection effort, and the development of valid and reliable tools to the field of education. Read the research overview.
  • Supplementary studies that aim to be responsive to the needs of education practitioners and policymakers. These studies investigate professional environments, teacher effects, teacher evaluation systems, and item response theory
  • National leadership activities such as conferences and webinars. You can learn more about these topics by accessing our resources below. 

The project is led by Harvard Graduate School of Education Professors Thomas J. Kane and Heather Hill, Dartmouth College Professor Douglas O. Staiger, and Project Director Corinne Herlihy.

Mark Chin

Mark Chin

Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Inequality, Vanderbilt University
Partnering in Education Research (PIER) Fellow Alum

Job Market Paper: Breaking rank? An investigation of families’ preferences for schools and their causal moderators
Dissertation Committee: Martin West, David Deming, Desmond Ang
Research Interests: School Integration, School Choice, Racial Attitudes/Bias, Prosocial Behavior, Sociopolitical Preferences, Applied Quantitative Methods in Education Research
PIER Summer Residency Placement: Wake County Public Schools

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Prioritizing Teaching Quality in a New System of Teacher Evalaution

November 11, 2011

National Center for Teacher Effectiveness (NCTE) leaders Heather Hill and Corinne Herlihy  emphasize the importance of focusing on the quality of teaching, and not "teacher quality," in the following article published in the Education Outlook Series by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Teachers are the most important school-level factor in student success—but as any parent knows, all teachers are not created equal. Reforms to the current quite cursory teacher evaluation system, if done well, have the potential to remove the...

Read more about Prioritizing Teaching Quality in a New System of Teacher Evalaution

Education Agencies

With the goal of positioning ourselves as a national resource on teacher effectiveness research, we have partnered with four school districts on the east coast to conduct rigorous research, develop tools, and share best practices and lessons learned in teacher evaluation and professional development.

Funder

The National Center for Teacher Effectiveness is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305C090023 to the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.