This report is about conceptual and methodological issues that arise when educational researchers use data from large-scale, survey research studies to investigate teacher effects on student achievement. In the report, we illustrate these issues by reporting on a series of analyses we conducted using data from Prospects: The Congressionally Mandated Study of Educational Opportunity. This large-...

The purpose of this study was to determine if self-reported teaching style beliefs were different among faculty at a U.S. and an Israeli dental school. Teacher-centered practices refer to beliefs that the teacher holds the subject matter expertise and students are generally passive learners who must be told what to think. Student-centered practices refer to beliefs that students must learn how ...

In this paper, we propose a generative knowledge transfer technique that trains an RNN based language model (student network) using text and output probabilities generated from a previously trained RNN (teacher network). The text generation can be conducted by either the teacher or the student network. We can also improve the performance by taking the ensemble of soft labels obtained from multi...

Teacher judgments of student learning are a key element in performance assessment. This study examines aspects of the validity of teacher judgments that are based on the Work Sampling System (WSS), a curriculumembedded, performance assessment for preschool (age 3) to Grade 5. The purpose of the study is to determine if teacher judgments about student learning in kindergarten to third grade are ...

This paper analyzes the effect of assigning homework on student achievement using data from 16 OECD countries that participated in TIMSS 2007. The model exploits withinstudent variation in homework across subjects in a sample of primary school students who have the same teacher in two related subjects; mathematics and science. Unobserved teacher and student characteristics are thus conditioned ...

Teachers are increasingly being drawn from the lower parts of the general ability distribution, but it is not clear how this affects student achievement. We track the position of entering teachers in population-wide cognitive and non-cognitive ability distributions using school grades and draft records from Swedish registers. The impact on student achievement caused by the position of teachers ...

Many graduate and professional programs include Problem Based Learning (PBL) as a mainstay in their curricula. For many undergraduate students, this is a change from a teacher-centered to a student-centered learning method. This study was undertaken to learn about perceptions and test performances of college students (N=116) enrolled in liberal education classes when PBL is used vs. traditional...

We investigated growth trajectories for classroom performance goal practices and for student behavioral engagement across grades 2 to 5 for 497 academically at-risk elementary students. This study is the first longitudinal investigation of performance goal practices in the early elementary years. On average, teacher use of performance goal practices increased and students' behavioral engagement...

It is often said that students who perform well in school are those that understand the rules of the game. In other words, students need to understand not only the content related to an activity, but also the teacher expectations for how to participate in that activity and how the activity is typically structured (Doyle, 1979; Mehan, 1980). Lemke (1990) provides an example of a predominant acti...