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Can Teacher Quality Be Effectively Assessed? National Board Certification as a Signal of Effective Teaching
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In this paper, we describe the results of a study assessing the relationship between the certification of teachers by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and elementary-level student achievement. We examine whether NBPTS assesses the most effective applicants, whether certification by NBPTS serves as a signal of teacher quality, and whether completing the NBPTS assessment process serves as a catalyst for increasing teacher effectiveness. We find consistent evidence that NBPTS is identifying the more effective teacher applicants and that National Board Certified Teachers are generally more effective than teachers who never applied to the program. The statistical significance and magnitude of the "NBPTS effect," however, differs significantly by grade level and student type. We do not find evidence that the NBPTS certification process itself does anything to increase teacher effectiveness. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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... However, research findings are mixed overall. While some studies have shown a correlation between National Board Certification and student performance in certain contexts (Manzeske et al., 2017;Goldhaber & Anthony, 2007), others found little difference in instructional practices and student growth between NBCTs and non-NBCTs (Stronge et al., 2008). Cowan and Goldhaber (2016) emphasized that many earlier studies are now outdated due to revisions in the NBPTS process. ...
... It is also important to consider that not all teachers who might qualify for National Board Certification choose to pursue it, which means that comparative studies may not fully capture the potential effectiveness of NBCTs. Furthermore, NBCTs are often concentrated in more affluent, high-performing schools, suggesting that National Board Certification should be considered alongside other factors when evaluating teacher effectiveness (Goldhaber & Anthony, 2007). ...
SC TEACHER’s research mission includes publishing yearly reports that detail the South Carolina educator workforce, sharing insights with educators themselves, policymakers, community members, and other stakeholders. This report is an annual review of the state's public school teacher workforce.
... However, the qualitative findings also highlight challenges that need to be addressed to maximize the program's impact. These include limited access to professional development, particularly for teachers in remote areas, lack of school-level support for implementing new practices, and inadequate resources in some schools.[11][12][13][14][15] While this study reveals significant improvements in teacher competencies and teaching practices among certified teachers, the impact on student learning outcomes, as reflected in Mathematics and Science scores, appears to be modest. ...
Teacher quality is crucial for improving education outcomes. Indonesia introduced the Teacher Certification Program (Sertifikasi Guru) in 2005 to enhance teacher professionalism. This study investigates the program's effectiveness in Jambi Province by analyzing its impact on teacher competencies, teaching practices, and student learning outcomes. This mixed-methods study involved 300 certified and 300 non-certified teachers in Jambi Province. Quantitative data were collected through questionnaires and student achievement records, analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-tests, and regression analysis. Qualitative data were gathered through interviews with 30 teachers, 10 school principals, and 5 education officials, and analyzed thematically. Certified teachers exhibited significantly higher pedagogical knowledge, subject matter knowledge, and classroom management skills than non-certified teachers. They were also more likely to employ active learning and student-centered approaches. However, the impact on student learning outcomes was modest. In conclusion, Jambi's Teacher Certification Program successfully improved teacher competencies and teaching practices. However, further efforts are needed to enhance its impact on student learning outcomes. Recommendations include strengthening the program's focus on practical application, providing ongoing professional development, and increasing school-level support for effective teaching.
... Our work is closely related to the literature on certification systems because inspection service can essentially be considered a type of certification Goldhaber [41]. Consider that accurate certification is a sign of teacher effectiveness Bolton et al. [42]. ...
Trading idle products through second-hand C2C (Customer-to-Customer) platforms by customers benefits both the economy and the environment. In practice, different C2C platforms employ varied strategies for implementing inspection services. To facilitate the sustainable development of the second-hand market, we developed a game-theoretic model incorporating buyers, sellers, and a platform to explore whether the platform should implement an inspection service and examine its effect on second-hand transactions. The results indicate that the buyer's belief and the quality standard play pivotal roles when the platform determines its implementation strategy for the inspection service. The interplay of these two factors may result in that providing inspection service hurts the platform. The effect of the inspection service on second-hand transactions is dual-faceted. On one hand, it mitigates the buyer's quality concern and enhances the scale of transactions. On the other hand, it increases the buyer’s costs and may attract additional lower-quality sellers into the market. We further analyse the welfare of various participants within the supply chain. Our findings contribute to assisting the managers of C2C platforms in optimizing operational strategies. Additionally, these findings benefit stakeholders by helping them objectively comprehend the value of inspection service.
... A performance appraisal system which develops and recognizes quality teaching through voluntary certification of teachers in the US was carried out by National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). Evidence show that students taught by teachers certified by this system do much well on standardized tests, compared to students taught by noncertified teachers, (Goldhaber & Anthony, 2007;Smith, Gordon, Colby & Wang, 2005). This shows that the process of NBPTS has a greater effect in teaching. ...
Strategic administrative initiatives in schools helps in identifying emerging trends and anticipate future challenges, allowing them to prepare and respond proactively so as to bring change in students’ academic performance. For three consecutive years (2016 -2018), Kisii County’s mean standard score in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education declined resulting to an average mean standard score of 3.765 (D+) which was still below the National Mean Standard Score of 3.962. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which strategic administrative initiatives influence academic performance. Education Production Function theory was applied. The study employed a descriptive survey design. Target population of 353 principals and 4354 teachers were considered from 353 public secondary schools in Kisii County. Slovin’s formula with a margin error of 0.05 was used to sample 28 principals and 341 teachers as respondents. Stratified random sampling was used to get school categories. Instruments for this research included: questionnaire for teachers and interview schedule for principals. Validity of research instruments was ascertained by supervisors’ inputs from the School of Education Kisii University. Questionnaires were considered reliable since Cronbach’s Coefficient Alpha 0.998 obtained was higher than the critical Cronbach alpha of 0.7 on a scale of -1 to +1 by use of test re-test method. Data was analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Qualitative data on interview schedules were organized based on research objective and themes of study. Data was presented using percentages, means, frequency distribution tables and bar graphs for easier interpretation. This study’s findings were: The strategic administrative initiatives have a positive influence on academic performance. This study is significant as it indicates that county and sub-county secondary schools need to improve on the application of the strategic administrative initiatives in the academic activities/programs for them to do better academically. In conclusion, National and Extra- County secondary schools’ strategic administrative initiatives have a high positive influence on academic performance compared to county and sub-county secondary schools.
... While providing basic methods for evaluating teaching effectiveness, they often fail to fully capture the complexity of the teaching process. Goldhaber and Anthony (2007) used students' prior achievement as a benchmark to predict their performance in specific subjects through a value-added mode, but this approach fails to take into account other important factors in the teaching process. Mandasari and Wahyudin (2021) discussed the impact of flipped classroom on student satisfaction through three ways: observation, questionnaire and interview, but these evaluation tools are somewhat subjective. ...
Higher education is beginning to focus on how to effectively cultivate IoT engineers who possess both hard skills and soft skills. Therefore, from the perspective of activity theory and combining it with project-based learning, this study constructed a project-based learning framework based on activity theory and applied this framework to an IoT course at a university in central China. The first half of the course adopted a traditional lecture-based teaching method, while the second half of the course was carried out based on the proposed framework, thus constituting a control group and an experimental group. To further explore the effectiveness of the proposed framework on IoT courses, the data of this study consisted of two aspects: on the one hand, questionnaires on students’ learning engagement and satisfaction with the IoT course were collected; on the other hand, with the help of an intelligent teaching analytics platform, the effectiveness of the proposed framework in optimizing the classroom structure was objectively analyzed from three dimensions of teaching mode, classroom atmosphere, and teacher-student intimacy. The experimental results showed that compared with traditional teaching, teaching based on the proposed framework can significantly improve students’ learning engagement and satisfaction. Specifically, the increase in emotional engagement was the highest at 43.07%, followed by a 26.42% increase in behavioral engagement and a 35.15% increase in cognitive engagement. Meanwhile, it also optimizes the classroom structure to a certain extent. The teaching mode has shifted from lecture-based to hybrid, the classroom atmosphere is more harmonious and equal, and the teacher-student intimacy is increasing.
This article provides robust empirical evidence for the association between science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and student achievement. Unlike previous studies, we employed two approaches (text-based vs. video-based tests) to assess if, and to what extent, teachers’ PCK assessed by these two approaches are related to student achievement. An analysis utilizing two-level hierarchical linear modeling revealed that PCK assessed by both types of tests reveals a significant and positive association with student achievement. Teachers’ PCK assessed by the video-based test better predicted student achievement than teachers’ PCK assessed by the text-based test. Based on this result, we discuss implications for research on teacher knowledge and policy implications for teacher education.
Effective teaching is considered one of the dominant and emerging topics in education. Hence, there are two objectives of the study. The first objective is to bibliometricaly analyze the performance in terms of citations and publications of Effective Teaching studies. The second objective is to analyze the research themes of Effective Teaching studies. The motivation to conduct this study is based on the gaps in previous studies on effective teaching. This study mainly uses bibliometric analysis, whereby 986 documents were analyzed through two stages – descriptive analysis and keyword network analysis. Selected findings indicated that since 1941, effective teaching studies displayed a growing trend in publications and citation performances. In addition, five research themes dominate effective teaching - 1) effective teaching in higher education, 2) enhancing curriculum with blended teaching, 3) pedagogical professional development, 4) medical education effectiveness, and 5) teacher training for classroom effectiveness. The authors also suggested six potential future research questions in terms of mixed theories, practical and methodology aspects. Hence, the significance of the study is to inspire potential scholars to explore potential holes available in effective teaching
This article finds the relationship that learning environments have on school success, in the Latin American countries participating in the International Program for Student Assessment (PISA), of the year 2018, estimating the Educational Production Function. Subsequently, the Shorrocks-Shapley decomposition is applied to determine which of the dimensions associated with learning has a greater weight in the heterogeneity of school success. It was found that the best school environments favor school success, while when the school climate in the classroom is "not the best", performance drops. It was calculated, for the group of Latin American countries, that, on average, learning environments explain the variability of school success in 29.09% for mathematics, 28.01% for reading and 28.71% for science, being the dimension that to a greater extent explains this heterogeneity.
Many school districts experience difficulties attracting and retaining teachers, and the impending retirement of a substantial fraction of public school teachers raises the specter of severe shortages in some public schools. Schools in urban areas serving economically disadvantaged and minority students appear parlicularly vulnerable. This paper investigates those factors that affect the probabilities that teachers switch schools or exit the public schools entirely. The results indicate that teacher mobility is much more strongly related to characteristics of the students, particularly race and achievement, than to salary, although salary exerts a modest impact once compensating differentials are taken into account.
A universe of education production function studies was assembled in order to utilize meta-analytic methods to assess the direction and magnitude of the relations between a variety of school inputs and student achievement. The 60 primary research studies aggregated data at the level of school districts or smaller units and either controlled for socioeconomic characteristics or were longitudinal in design. The analysis found that a broad range of resources were positively related to student outcomes, with effect sizes large enough to suggest that moderate increases in spending may be associated with significant increases in achievement. The discussion relates the findings of this study with trends in student achievement from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and changes in social capital over the last two decades.
Research on educational production functions attempts to model the relation between resource inputs and school outcomes such as educational achievement. Over the last decade a series of influential reviews of this literature have suggested that there is no systematic relation between resource inputs and school outcomes when controlling for student characteristics such as socioeconomic status. The inference procedure used in these reviews, vote counting, is known to be problematic. This study is a reanalysis of data from these earlier reviews, using more sophisticated synthesis methods. It shows systematic positive relations between resource inputs and school outcomes. Moreover, analyses of the magnitude of these relations suggest that the median relation (regression coefficient) is large enough to be of practical importance.While this reanalysis suggests that previous data do not support the conclusions that Hanushek and others derived from it, limitations of their data set warrant caution in using it for policy formation.
National Board Certification represents one of the most significant reform efforts in the area of teacher quality in the last two decades. Since the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certified its first round of teachers in 1995, approximately 32,000 teachers have become certified at a cost to the country of well over $300 million, yet no large-scale quantitative research exists on the candidates of the program. In this article, we describe the results of a study of teachers in North Carolina assessing the factors associated with the decision to apply to NBPTS and those associated with certification of candidates. We find that, all else equal, teachers who are African-American, female, score higher on standardized tests, and/or are younger are more likely to apply for certification. Among applicants, we find that African-American and male teachers are less likely to be certified, and teachers who score higher on standardized tests are far more likely to be certified.