Teachers, student achievement and national income: A cross-national examination of relationships and interactions

Abstract

Despite costly global efforts to improve and reward teacher qualifications like education and experience, little international evidence exists on the relationship between these attributes and student achievement. It is also unclear whether these attributes are more important for disadvantaged children, or in lower-income countries. This article examines the relationships among teacher characteristics (experience, education, readiness to teach, and gender), student background, and fourth grade students' mathematics and science achievement across 25 diverse countries participating in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. The analysis revealed limited evidence that the teacher characteristics deemed important in teacher upgrading and compensation are systematically related to student test scores, or that these characteristics are more important for lowerincome students. It also found no relationship between national income and the importance of these characteristics. These results add to increasing evidence that efforts to improve teacher quality must look beyond simply increasing and rewarding measurable teacher qualifications like education and experience. Further, those who design cross-national studies should consider developing richer measures of teacher skill and knowledge.

A Review of the Literature on Teacher Effectiveness and Student Outcomes

“…Both TIMSS andIEA's Teacher Education andDevelopment Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M, conducted in 2007-2008) have included many questions, asking teachers to report on their preparedness to teach particular topics. Although Luschei and Chudgar (2011) and Gustafsson and Nilson (2016) found that these items had a weak direct relationship to student achievement across countries, other studies have suggested that readiness is related to instructional quality (Blomeke et al 2016), as well as content knowledge and content preparation (Schmidt et al 2017), suggesting that instructional quality may have an indirect effect on student learning.…”

“…Meanwhile, other studies have failed to identify consistent and statistically significant associations between student achievement and teacher experience (Blomeke et al 2016;Gustaffsson and Nilson 2016;Hanushek and Luque 2003;Luschei and Chudgar 2011;Wilson and Floden 2003). Some research from the United States has indicated that experience matters very much early on in a teacher's career, but that, in later years, there were little to no additional gains (Boyd et al 2006;Rivkin et al 2005;Staiger and Rockoff 2010).…”

Context factors and student achievement in the IEA studies: evidence from TIMSS

“…However, other studies found limited evidence of this impact on student achievement in both mathematics (Luschei and Chudgar 2011;Sturman and Lin 2011;Dodeen and Hilal 2012) and reading literacy (e.g., Van Daal et al 2006;Schagen and Twist 2008). Recently, Gao (2014) investigated whether inquiry-based instruction is more effective in influencing student science achievement than traditional teaching methods.…”

Socio-economic gaps in subject interest: the mediating role of parental cognitive involvement

“…For instance, researches have studied the family cultural mechanisms underlying SES achievement inequalities (Pokropek et al 2015;Tramonte and Willms 2010), the mediating role of home learning environment in SES achievement gaps (Caro 2015;Park 2008a), changes in the associations between family SES and student achievement (Yang Hansen et al 2011), regional differences in education inequality (e.g., Caro and Mirazchiyski 2012), whether the association between academic achievement and parent-child communication varies across levels of family SES (Caro 2011;Park 2008b), whether teacher characteristics interact with the student SES (Caro et al 2016;Luschei and Chudgar 2011), whether family SES accounts for the achievement gap between students with and without migration background (Shapira 2012), and whether the school SES composition has a role in student achievement in addition to the student SES (Caro and Lenkeit 2012;Willms 2003Willms , 2006.…”