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Educator preparation, professional development, performance and evaluation
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Paraeducators are among the largest categories of public education employees and are increasingly seen as a pool of potential teachers. However, little is known about paraeducator-to-teacher transitions. Using statewide administrative data, we show that while paraeducators may be more racially/ethnically diverse than the teacher workforce, Black and Hispanic paraeducators are less likely than White paraeducators to transition into teaching. We additionally show that teachers with paraeducator experience are similarly effective to teachers without paraeducator experience. Lastly, we use simulations to show that the potential for the paraeducator-to-teacher pipeline to diversify the teaching profession may be limited unless they are highly targeted. Our results have policy design implications for efforts to expand the paraeducator-to-teacher pipeline or to diversify the teacher workforce.
This study provides the first large-scale quantitative exploration of mathematical language use in upper elementary U.S. classrooms. Our approach employs natural language processing techniques to describe variation in teachers’ and students’ use of mathematical language in 1,657 fourth and fifth grade lessons in 317 classrooms in four districts over three years. Students’ exposure to mathematical language varies substantially across lessons and between teachers. Results suggest that teacher modeling, defined as the density of mathematical terms in teacher talk, does not substantially cause students to uptake mathematical language, but that teachers may encourage student use of mathematical vocabulary by means other than mere modeling or exposure. However, we also find that teachers who use more mathematical language are more effective at raising student test scores. These findings reveal that teachers who use more mathematical vocabulary are more effective math teachers.
Despite well-designed curriculum materials, teachers often face challenges in their implementation due to diverse classroom needs. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can support middle-school math teachers by helping create high-quality curriculum scaffolds, which we define as the adaptations and supplements teachers employ to ensure all students can access and engage with the curriculum. Through Cognitive Task Analysis with expert teachers, we identify a three-stage process for curriculum scaffolding: observation, strategy formulation, and implementation. We incorporate these insights into three LLM approaches to create warmup tasks that activate background knowledge. The best-performing approach, which provides the model with the original curriculum materials and an expert-informed prompt, generates warmups that are rated significantly higher than warmups created by expert teachers in terms of alignment to learning objectives, accessibility to students working below grade level, and teacher preference. This research demonstrates the potential of LLMs to support teachers in creating effective scaffolds and provides a methodology for developing AI-driven educational tools.
Despite evidence that teacher professional development interventions in mathematics and science can increase student achievement, our understanding of the mechanisms by which this occurs – particularly how these interventions affect teachers themselves, and whether teacher-level changes predict student learning – remains limited. The current meta-analysis synthesizes 46 experimental studies of preK-12 mathematics and science professional development interventions to investigate how these interventions affect teachers’ knowledge and classroom instruction, and how these impacts relate to intervention effects on student achievement. Compared with controls, treatment group teachers had stronger performance on measures of knowledge and classroom instruction (pooled average impact estimate: +0.53 SD). Programs with larger impacts on teacher practice had significantly larger mean effects on student achievement. However, mean effects on student achievement were not significantly related to impacts on teacher knowledge. We discuss implications for future research and practice.
Inconsistent reporting of critical facets of classroom interventions and their related impact evaluations hinders the field’s ability to describe and synthesize the existing evidence base. In this essay, we present a set of reporting guidelines intended to steer authors of classroom intervention studies toward providing more systematic reporting of key intervention features and setting-level factors that may affect interventions’ success. The guidelines were iteratively developed using recommendations and feedback from scholars active in conducting and synthesizing classroom intervention research. This effort aims to open wider the ‘black box’ in classroom research, communicating key information with more precision and detail to practitioners and future researchers, and permitting the field to more efficiently accumulate and synthesize findings on classroom interventions, determining what works, for whom, and under what conditions.
“Free college” programs are widespread in American higher education. They are discussed as addressing college access, affordability, inequality, and skills shortages. Many are last-dollar tuition guarantees restricted to use at single community colleges. Using student-level data spanning the transition to college, we investigate how two similar local community college tuition guarantees in Pennsylvania affected college-going outcomes. The Morgan Success Scholarship has large impacts on community college attendance and associate degree attainment. The program diverts students away from four-year colleges, though much of this effect is temporary. Meanwhile, we find little evidence that the Community College of Philadelphia’s 50th Anniversary Scholars program has any impact on college-going behavior. We suggest reasons for divergent findings and offer suggestions for practice.
We survey undergraduate students at a large public university to understand the pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors driving their college major and career decisions with a focus on K-12 teaching. While the average student reports there is a 6% chance they will pursue teaching, almost 27% report a nonzero chance of working as a teacher in the future. Students, relative to existing statistics, generally believe they would earn substantially more in a non-teaching job (relative to a teaching job). We run a randomized information experiment where we provide students with information on the pecuniary and non-pecuniary job characteristics of teachers and non-teachers. This low-cost informational intervention impacts students' beliefs about their job characteristics if they were to work as a teacher or non-teacher, and increases the reported likelihood they will major or minor in education by 35% and pursue a job as a teacher or in education by 14%. Linking the survey data with administrative transcript records, we find that the intervention had small (and weak) impacts on the decision to minor in education in the subsequent year. Overall, our results indicate that students hold biased beliefs about their career prospects, they update these beliefs when provided with information, and that this information has limited impacts on their choices regarding studying and having a career in teaching.
We use frame analysis to analyze the first iteration of the Texas District of Innovation policy, which allows districts to take exemption from state education requirements mandating the hiring of a state certified teacher. We analyzed 451 district policies and find the plans use very similar, and sometimes identical, language to frame both the problem of teacher shortage and their proposed solutions, even though the districts may be geographically and demographically different. The districts most often propose two solutions to the certified teacher shortage, 1) flexibility and 2) local control over teacher certification decisions, including hiring unlicensed teachers and locally certified teachers.
Despite the popularity of teacher leadership since the 1980s, little research examines its effects on student achievement. In this paper, I assess the influence of the New York City Department of Education’s Teacher Career Pathways program, a teacher leadership initiative, on student achievement in grades three through eight. Using difference-in-difference approaches, including new event study estimators, I find that where school leaders staffed teacher leaders into formal roles with defined responsibilities, positional authority, and commensurate salary increases, student achievement in ELA and math improves. Moreover, the improvement in scores compounds over time, with schools exhibiting increasing gains in each year following the initial introduction of teacher leaders. Schools that do not staff teacher leaders do not observe similar outcomes. I consider these results in the context of democratic policymaking and teacher empowerment, suggesting that teachers must be formally empowered in schools to lead meaningful changes that ultimately improve student achievement.