• No results found

35

the evaluator. The task is primarily that of showing the likely consequences of alternative routes and the decision maker chooses after considering several other factors.

36

a teacher is effective also depends to a large extent, on the characteristics of the students being taught by the teachers.

From these assumptions about teaching effectiveness/teacher effectiveness, it is noted that more is expected from the researcher or evaluator of teaching effectiveness to really have a valued and reliable instrument for measuring effective teaching. Despite the underlying assumptions, it seems reasonable to assume that those who are referred to as being “effective teachers” are more often than not effective in achieving specified learning goals. However, this effectiveness does not stem from rigid adherence to a standard set of behaviours, activities, methods or strategies in all situations. Rather, teachers who are consistently effective are those who are able to adapt their knowledge and skills to the demands inherent in various situations so as to best achieve their goals.

School administrators are aware of the influence of teachers on students‟ achievement. It is also generally recognized that there is a wide variation in teacher effectiveness both within and between schools (Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger 2008; Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff 2002; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005; Rockoff, 2004). In the last two decades, the record shows few ways of quantifying the variation in teacher classroom effectiveness. Many scholars agreed that teachers are hugely important, but noticed variations in teacher effectiveness within and between schools which is based on unobservable teacher characteristics that are difficult, if not impossible, to measure. School administrators could also recognize the difference in learning outcomes, as a result of a child assigned to one teacher over another. Although¸ quantitatively measuring the extent of a teacher's effectiveness was a daunting challenge, luckily, the empirical revolution that has occurred in education over the past few years has led to the development of a set of tools that are capable of quantifying the extent of variation in teacher effectiveness for the first time (McCaffrey, Lockwood, Koretz, & Hamilton, 2003). One of these tools is the Students‟

Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness Scale (SETES) which can be adopted or adapted by any researcher to measure teaching effectiveness of lecturers in any higher institutions of learning.

Hanushek (1992) has quantified the difference between having the “best” and the “worst”

teacher for one school year using data that were generated over a 4-year period by the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment, incorporating test scores from the Iowa Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary tests. In the study, all teachers were ranked based on effectiveness measured by student test scores and the difference between being assigned to a

37

teacher at the twenty-fifth percentile as compared to being assigned to a teacher at the seventy-_fifth percentile in quality was calculated. It was found out that the difference is about an additional grade-level's worth of proficiency by the end of the school year. Also, studies by researchers in Tennessee (Sanders & Rivers, 1996), New Jersey (Rockoff, 2004), Chicago (Aaronson et al., 2007) and Florida (West & Chingos, 2008) have all reached similar conclusions. As implied by the consensus reached by these independent studies of the magnitude of teacher‟s impacts, most contemporary education researchers agreed that teachers matter (Angrist & Lavy, 2001; Jacob & Lefgren, 2004; Jepsen & Rivkin, 2002; Kane, Rockoff, &

Stagier, 2006; Kane & Staiger, 2005; Rivers & Sanders, 2002; Rockoff, 2004). The biggest issue facing school leaders, researchers and others in the education community is quantifying how much a particular teacher‟s characteristics matters and whether it is possible to predict teacher‟s performance based on characteristics observed at the time of hiring, when the teacher is still very fresh and he/she is putting his/her best in the attainment of effective teaching.

Another important aspect to note is how much does teacher experience matter? It is intuitively appealing that a teacher's worst year is most likely his/her first year in the classroom, when classroom management issues are being tackled for the first time such as organizational routines are being established, curricula mapped and procedures developed. As a teacher's experience grows, however, we might expect that he/she is more likely to have figured out the most appropriate responses to a variety of classroom situations and problems, developed a strong sense of self-efficacy, that student achievement increases as a result (Tschannen-Moran &

Woolfolk Hoy, 2001; Woolfolk Hoy, Hoy, & Davis, 2009). There is also a belief that experience correlates with effectiveness, however, findings modest effects of experience limited to the first few years of a teacher's career, suggests that teacher effectiveness in most cases grows in the initial four or five years in the classroom and then begins to level off. (Hanushek, et al. 2005;

Kane, et al. 2006; & Rockoff, 2004)

2.6.1. Teaching Effectiveness and Students’ Achievement

Teaching effectiveness is an instructor‟s degree of success in facilitating student learning.

The more students learn, the deeper the cognitive levels at which they learn, and the better they can communicate (or perform) what they have learned, the more effective an instructor‟s teaching. Formative evaluation in teaching is the evaluation activities done to provide instructors

38

with information they can use to improve their teaching; intended for personal use rather than public inspection; information is private and confidential; information is rich in detail so teachers can obtain clear insights on nature of teaching; Formative evaluation is informal, ongoing and wide ranging while Summative evaluation in teaching is the information gathered to make personnel decisions (hiring, promotion, tenure, merit pay); information is for public inspection;

not intended to provide rich and detailed data for improvement of teaching.

Although students‟ achievement is regarded as the purest form of assessing teacher‟s effectiveness, however, most investigations found little correlation between achievement and students‟ ratings. For example, in a well-controlled meta-analysis, Cohen (1983) found that students‟ achievement accounted for 14.4 percent of overall instructor rating variance. Other analyses have turned up even lower estimates of student rating validity. In a meta analysis of 14 multi-section validity studies, and, in a quantitative analysis of six validity studies chosen for their exceptional control of student presage variables, Dowell and Neal (1982) found that student achievement accounted for only 3.9 percent of between-teacher students‟ rating variance. In a more comprehensive study, Damron (1996) found that it is likely that most of the factors contributing to student instructional ratings are unrelated to an instructor‟s ability to promote student learning.

The magnitude of teacher‟s impacts on student‟s achievement outcomes is again affirmed by the findings of Aaronson, Barrow and Sander (2007). The measure of teacher quality employed in their study is the effect on ninth-grade mathematics scores of a semester of instruction with a particular teacher, controlling for prior-year mathematics scores and a range of observable student characteristics. The improvement on the part of the teacher positively influences the score of the students over one year by approximately one-fifth of average yearly gains. The magnitude of this estimate is statistically similar to the results reported by Rockoff (2004) and Rivkin et al. (2005).

39