National Center on Teacher Effectiveness: Validating Measures of Effective Math Teaching

Co-Principal Investigaror: Heather Hill

Purpose: The National Center on Teacher Effectiveness: Validating Measures of Effective Math Teaching will identify practices and characteristics that distinguish between more and less effective teachers and will use this information to develop a suite of empirically validated and practical instruments that can be used by school districts to select, deploy, and retain more effective teachers. While focusing on math instruction in grades 4 through 6, the Center will have four primary goals:

• to unify the disparate strands of research on teacher effectiveness, combining “value-added” measures based on student achievement gains with a close study of the features of effective teachers and teaching;
• to develop a suite of empirically validated instruments for measuring teacher effectiveness;
• to operationalize the measures and ensure that they are usable in the field;
• to externally validate the measure of teacher effectiveness against student achievement.

A secondary goal is to work cooperatively with the Institute to formulate and carry out the results of supplementary research studies that are responsive to the needs of education practitioners and policy makers.