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School Subjects Do Not Matter? Investigating the Subject Specificity of Teaching Quality

Sun, April 10, 8:15 to 9:45am, Convention Center, Floor: Level One, Room 158 B

Abstract

Purpose and Framework. Teachers differ in their teaching efficacy. Several authors thus conclude that it is the teacher who matters (e.g., Kane, McCaffrey, Miller, & Staiger, 2013). However, this view has been challenged, arguing that teachers and teaching cannot be used synonymously and that it is rather teaching than the teacher that matters (e.g., Kennedy, 2010; Grossman, Loeb, Cohen, & Wyckoff, 2013). The two most prominent ways of disentangling teacher effects from teaching and situational effects is investigating year-to-year or subject-to-subject within-person variation of teaching quality (Kennedy, 2010). For the present study, the second approach was chosen as the first approach is more likely to confound variability and developmental change as well as time stability and trans-situational stability. Existing investigations regarding the stability of teaching quality across subjects showed correlations between value-added gains for mathematics and reading of .35 ≤ r ≤ .65 (Goldhaber, Cowan, & Walch, 2012). The disadvantage of student gains is that they are not only dependent on teaching quality but also influenced by several student, peer, and parent characteristics (see e.g., Hattie, 2009). A more proximal indicator of the subject-to-subject variation in teaching is thus investigating the subject-to-subject variation of teaching quality characteristics themselves. Thus, in the present study the extent to which teaching quality (here: classroom management and motivational support; see Lipowsky, Rakoczy, Pauli, Drollinger-Vetter, Klieme, & Reusser, 2009) is subject-specific or rather an individual characteristic attributable to the teacher, independent of the subject(s) he or she teaches, is investigated.
Methods. The study reanalyzed data from a German longitudinal study of 9th grade students’ language achievement and language instruction in German and English (DESI-Konsortium, 2008). Of the representative sample of 427 teachers, those 25 teachers (68% female) and their 548 students were selected who taught their students in both subjects, German and English. Teaching quality was measured with class-aggregated student ratings regarding the two dimensions classroom management (2 subscales, 9 items in total; α = .79-.82; ICC(2) = .85-.88) and motivational support (3 subscales, 12 items in total; α = .93-.94; ICC(2) = .81-.86). The data was analyzed using a completely crossed two-facet design (teacher × subject × subscale) within generalizability theory (Shavelson & Webb, 1991).
Results. The analyses revealed that for classroom management the ratio of subject-independent teacher differences to subject-specific differences in classroom management was 10:1. For motivational support, the ratio of subject-independent to subject-specific differences in teaching quality was 2:1.
Significance. The subject a teacher teaches seems to influence teaching quality to a considerable degree, especially regarding teachers’ motivational support. The results of the present study thus indicate that it is important to take situational and contextual factors into account when investigating teaching quality. The results additionally point towards a need for being cautious regarding the interpretation of teaching quality when teachers are teaching in different circumstances, e.g., comparing teaching quality of teachers without controlling for the subject the teacher teaches or comparing teaching quality of teachers in different school systems in which subjects play a different role for their teaching.

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