Teacher and Teaching Effects on Students' Academic Performance, Attitudes, and Behaviors

Abstract

Research confirms that teachers have substantial impacts on their students’ academic and life-long success. However, little is known about specific dimensions of teaching practice that explain these relationships or whether these effects differ between academic and “non-cognitive” outcomes. Drawing on data from teachers in four urban school districts, I document the relationship between individual teachers and students’ math performance, as well as their self-reported self-efficacy in math, happiness in class, and behavior in class. In addition, I estimate the relationship between domains of teaching practice captured by two observation instruments and the set of student outcomes. Finally, I examine the predictive validity of teacher effect estimates on students’ attitudes and behaviors amongst a subset of teachers who were randomly assigned to class rosters within schools. I find that upper-elementary teachers have large effects on a range of students’ attitudes and behaviors in addition to their academic performance. These teacher effect estimates have moderate to strong predictive validity. Further, student outcomes are predicted by teaching practices most proximal to these measures (e.g., between teachers’ math errors and students’ math achievement, and between teachers’ classroom organization and students’ behavior in class). However, teachers who are effective at improving some outcomes often are not equally effective at improving others. Together, these findings lend important empirical evidence to well-established theory on the multidimensional nature of teaching and student learning and, thus, the need for policies that account for and incentivize this complexity.