What does this mean for Colleges of Education?

February 11, 2009 Uncategorized

I thought this U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Science report was very interesting. The report, An Evaluation of Teachers Trained Through Different Routes to Certification “compares the achievement of elementary school students in the same grade, at the same school who were randomly assigned to teachers who chose to be trained through different routes to certification – traditional education school routes and alternative routes.” Here are three of the study’s findings:

• There was no statistically significant difference in performance between
  students of AC teachers and those of TC teachers. Average differences in
  reading and math achievement were not statistically significant. Furthermore,
  students of AC teachers scored higher than students of their TC counterparts
  in nearly as many cases as they scored lower (49 percent in reading and 44
  percent in math). The effects of AC teachers varied across experiments, and
  nonexperimental correlational analysis of teachers’ pretraining and training
  experiences explained 5 percent of the variation in math and 2 percent in
  reading. Therefore, the route to certification selected by a prospective teacher
  is unlikely to provide information, on average, about the expected quality of
  that teacher in terms of student achievement.
• There is no evidence from this study that greater levels of teacher training
  coursework were associated with the effectiveness of AC teachers in the
  classroom. The experimental results provided no evidence that students of
  low-coursework AC teachers scored statistically differently from students of
  their TC counterparts, nor did students of high-coursework AC teachers
  compared to those of their TC counterparts. Correlational analysis similarly
  failed to show that the amount of coursework was associated with student
  achievement. Therefore, there is no evidence that AC programs with greater
  coursework requirements produce more effective teachers.
• There is no evidence that the content of coursework is correlated with
  teacher effectiveness. After controlling for other observable characteristics that
  may be correlated with a teacher’s effectiveness, there was no statistically
  significant relationship between student test scores and the content of the
  teacher’s training, including the number of required hours of math pedagogy,
  reading/language arts pedagogy, or fieldwork. Similarly, there was no evidence
  of a statistically positive relationship between majoring in education and student
  achievement.

So, what does this mean for our colleges of education? If there’s no statistical difference in student scores, doesn’t that mean that teaching doesn’t matter or does it mean that our curriculum for new teachers isn’t any more effective than a traditional college education? I simply can’t believe it is the former, since we have other research that has shown effective teaching has a direct impact on student achievement. The third finding supports my position. In my mind, it appears the study shows us that our colleges of education don’t add any value for new teachers. The study would seem to suggest that an average college graduate is just as prepared with an alternative certification program as someone who has been through a traditional teacher certification process. Hopefully, this will be a call to arms for education deans to utilize student performance data to measure the effectiveness of their programs and to modify the programs to better prepare new teachers with the knowledge and skills that will make their instruction effective at raising student achievement. If not, why do we bother?

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