Selection of Teacher Preparation Program Models

To provide information about effective methods of preparing and certifying teachers, the study design called for selecting a sample of teacher preparation models that were different from one another in structure and amount of coursework. Because the sampled programs were characteristic of the types of programs that train most of the nation's teachers, the study provides comparative information on teacher effectiveness for those able to hire from both routes. To shed light on whether the timing of training is related to the effect of teachers on student achievement and classroom practices, we focused on programs that place teachers in classrooms in one of two ways: (1) after the teachers have completed all their training (TC programs), and (2) before they have completed it (AC programs). In terms of coursework, we did not limit our focus within the pool of AC or TC programs, but for the analyses we distinguished the AC programs with relatively low coursework requirements from those with relatively high ones, which helped us assess whether increasing the volume of coursework is related to teacher effectiveness. Finally, all the AC programs in the study had to have less selective entrance requirements.³ We focused on such AC programs for two reasons. First, most TC programs do not have highly selective entrance requirements (Hess 2001), nor do most AC programs (Walsh and Jacobs 2007; Mayer et al. 2003). Hence, less selective programs, whether AC or TC, are more policy relevant, since these are the programs that produce most teachers working today.

Second, AC programs with less selective entrance requirements are similar to the likely entrance requirements of the education programs attended by TC teachers in the study. To examine the relationship between preservice teacher training characteristics and teacher performance, it is important to disentangle the effects of the teacher training program on student achievement and classroom practices from the effects of pretraining teacher characteristics. Limiting the AC programs to the ones with entrance requirements similar to those of most TC programs helps to decrease at least some of the potential differences between teachers who attend AC or TC programs. For example, if the study included AC teachers entering through the TFA program or other highly selective teaching programs who, on average, attended more selective undergraduate institutions and have higher SAT or ACT scores than teachers who attended less selective AC programs or TC programs, then it would be more difficult to determine whether relative differences in the classroom are due to the programs attended or to teachers' pretraining.