Do Smarter Teachers Make Smarter Students?
March 21, 2019The Value of Smarter Teachers: International Evidence on Teacher Cognitive Skills and Student Performance: This new research addresses a number of critical questions: Are a teacher’s cognitive skills a good predictor of teacher quality? Using this measure, does teacher quality account for the wide variation of student achievement across ours and other nations? This study examines the student achievement of 36 developed countries in the context of teacher cognitive skills. It uses data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which generates the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which tests the literacy and numeracy skills of 15 year old students and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) which tests literacy and numeracy skills of adults 16-65 (which includes teachers).
Existing research demonstrates that teachers have the greatest impact of any other school-based factor. It also tells us that teachers’ experience, advanced degrees, and professional development are not very good predictors of teacher effectiveness. There is increasing evidence that a teacher’s own scholastic performance (literacy and numeracy cognitive skills) is consistently related to student outcomes.
The study used multiple approaches to examine the data, and found that: (1) there was great variability in both student achievement and teachers’ cognitive skills across countries, (2) the higher the teachers’ cognitive skills, the more academically successful the students, (3) the effects were more pronounced within a subject area (teachers with higher numeracy skills in math produced higher student achievement in math than reading and vice versa), and (4) students performed better where teachers had higher salaries. One of the implications of the study is the value of targeting potential teachers with higher cognitive skills. High scoring Singapore, Finland, and Korea recruit their teachers exclusively from the top third of their college graduating class. Less than a quarter of U.S. teachers came from this same group.
Citation: Hanushek, E. A., Piopiunik, M., & Wiederhold, S. (2014). The value of smarter teachers: International evidence on teacher cognitive skills and student performance (No. w20727). National Bureau of Economic Research.