This volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is the only international large-scale study possessing a design framework that enables investigation of relations between teachers, their teaching, and student outcomes in mathematics. TIMSS provides both student achievement data and contextual background data from schools, teachers, students and parents, for over 60 countries. This book makes a major contribution to the field of educational effectiveness, especially teaching effectiveness, where cross-cultural comparisons are scarce. For readers interested in teacher quality, instructional quality, and student achievement and motivation in mathematics, the comparisons across cultures, grades, and time are insightful and thought-provoking. For readers interested in methodology, the advanced analytical methods, combined with application of methods new to educational research, illustrate interesting novel directions in methodology and the secondary analysis of international large-scale assessment (ILSA).

Teacher quality is the single most important school-related factor influencing student success. The author examines the body of research on the subject of teacher quality to draw conclusions about which attributes makes teachers most effective, (experience, preparation programs and degrees, type of certification, specific coursework taken in preparation for the profession, and teachers' own test scores), with a focus on aspects of teacher quality that can be translated into policy recommendations and incorporated into teaching practice.

This open access book examines the interrelationship of national policy, teacher effectiveness, and student outcomes with a specific emphasis on educational equity. Using data from the IEA’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) conducted between 1995 and 2015, it investigates grade four and grade eight data to assess trends in key teacher characteristics (experience, education, preparedness, and professional development) and teacher behaviors (instructional time and instructional content), and how these relate to student outcomes. Taking advantage of national curriculum data collected by TIMSS to assess changes in curricular strategy across countries and how these may be related to changes in teacher and student factors, the study focuses on the distributional impact of curriculum and instruction on students, paying particular attention to overall inequalities and variations in socioeconomic status at the student and country level, and how such factors have altered over time. Multiple methods, including regression and fixed effects analyses, and structural equation modelling, establish the evolution of these associations over time.

Americans have adopted a reform agenda for their schools that calls for excellence in teaching and learning. School officials across the nation are hard at work targeting instruction at high levels for all students. Gaps remain, however, between the nation's educational aspirations and student achievement. To address these gaps, policy makers have recently focused on the qualifications of teachers and the preparation of teacher candidates. This book examines the appropriateness and technical quality of teacher licensure tests currently in use, evaluates the merits of using licensure test results to hold states and institutions of higher education accountable for the quality of teacher preparation and licensure, and suggests alternatives for developing and assessing beginning teacher competence. Teaching is a complex activity. Definitions of quality teaching have changed and will continue to change over time as society's values change. This book provides policy makers, teacher testers, and teacher educators with advice on how to use current tests to assess teacher candidates and evaluate teacher preparation, ensuring that America's youth are being taught by the most qualified candidates.

We know that teachers make a profound difference in the lives of students and are the single most important school-related influence on student achievement. When it comes to teacher selection, district and building-level administrators are challenged to predict what kind of teacher a candidate will be, based on information collected through an application and one or two interviews. In this book, James H. Stronge and Jennifer L. Hindman explain how to take the guesswork out of hiring decisions. Their Teacher Quality Index (TQI) is a structured, research-based interview protocol built on the quality indicators explored in Stronge's best-selling Qualities of Effective Teachers. Here, educators with hiring responsibilities will find interview questions that reveal what they most need to know about teacher candidates and question-specific, descriptive rubrics that support consistent evaluation of candidates' responses. The Teacher Quality Index is the easiest, most reliable way to see that new hires possess both the personal qualities essential to effective teachers and the requisite proficiencies in classroom management, instructional planning and delivery, and the monitoring of student progress and potential. An accompanying CD-ROM provides forms and scoring rubrics for both screening interviews and building-based interviews. The question sets are presented in multiple configurations: variations for experienced and novice teachers as well as "interviewer's choice" formats, which allow for additional customization. Protocol guidelines, succinct discussions of underlying research, and response-rating exercises ensure readers will come away with the rationale, know-how, and tools to implement this teacher-selection process and, ultimately, increase the overall effectiveness of their teaching staff.

This book brings together the current thinking and research of two major investigators in the field of educational effectiveness. After defining educational effectiveness, the authors analyse the various theories and strands of research within educational effectiveness, especially with respect to the comprehensive model developed by Creemers. Written by one of the worlds leading experts in the field, this book will both elucidate our current understanding of educational effectiveness and carry the discipline forward by proposing profound changes to accepted views.

This work reports the findings of the Professional Competence of Teachers, Cognitively Activating Instruction, and Development of Students ́ Mathematical Literacy project (COACTIV). COACTIV applies a broad, innovative conceptualization of teacher competence to examine how mathematics teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, motivational orientations, and self-regulation skills influence their instructional practice and teaching outcomes In this project data was collected on various aspects of teacher competence and classroom instruction from the perspective of both the teachers themselves and their students. Moreover, it gauges the effects of these teacher characteristics on student learning, as indexed by the progress students in each class. Questions addressed in the study which are reported in this volume include: What are the characteristics of successful teaching? What distinguishes teachers who succeed in their profession? How can the quality of instruction be improved?

The idea of the ICMI Study 13 is outlined as follows: Education in any social environment is influenced in many ways by the traditions of these environments. This study brings together leading experts to research and report on mathematics education in a global context. Mathematics education faces a split phenomenon of difference and correspondence. A study attempting a comparison between mathematics education in different traditions will be helpful to understanding this phenomenon.

Teacher evaluation systems are being overhauled by states and districts across the United States. And, while intentions are admirable, the result for many new systems is that goodoften excellentteachers are lost in the process. In the end, students are the losers. In her new book, Linda Darling-Hammond makes a compelling case for a research-based approach to teacher evaluation that supports collaborative models of teacher planning and learning. She outlines the most current research informing evaluation of teaching practice that incorporates evidence of what teachers do and what their students learn. In addition, she examines the harmful consequences of using any single student test as a basis for evaluating individual teachers. Finally, Darling-Hammond offers a vision of teacher evaluation as part of a teaching and learning system that supports continuous improvement, both for individual teachers and for the profession as a whole.

Current social and education policies directed toward children focus on improving cognition, yet success in life requires more than smarts. Heckman calls for a refocus of social policy toward early childhood interventions designed to enhance both cognitive abilities and such non-cognitive skills as confidence and perseverance. This new focus on preschool intervention would emphasize improving the early environments of disadvantaged children and increasing the quality of parenting while respecting the primacy of the family and America's cultural diversity. Heckman shows that acting early has much greater positive economic and social impact than later interventions -- which range from reduced pupil-teacher ratios to adult literacy programs to expenditures on police -- that draw the most attention in the public policy debate. At a time when state and local budgets for early interventions are being cut, Heckman issues an urgent call for action and offers some practical steps for how to design and pay for new programs.