Predictors of Teachers' Instructional Practices

We extend this line of research by investigating teacher career and background characteristics, personal resources, and school and district resources that predict an array of instructional practices identified on a mathematics-specific observational instrument, MQI, and a general instrument, CLASS. To understand these relationships, we use correlation and regression analyses. For a subset of teachers for whom we have data from multiple school years, we exploit within-teacher, cross-year variation to examine the relationship between class composition and instructional quality that is not confounded with the sorting of "better" students to "better" teachers. We conclude that multiple teacher- and school-level characteristics--rather than a single factor--are related to teachers' classroom practices.