Measuring Instructional Quality: Attending to Stability, Criterion Consistency, and the Effect of Different Teacher Characteristics

• In Event: 18.071 - Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: 18.071-2 - School Effectiveness and School Improvement SIG Roundtable Session

Abstract

As the need to ensure appropriate teacher evaluations escalates, researchers have started to closely attend to different issues surrounding observational measures, including their stability and criterion-consistency. Most attempts, however, focus on generic observation instruments. Drawing on a content-specific instrument—the Mathematical Quality of Instruction—and applying multi-level growth modeling to data from 38 elementary schoolteachers each teaching six lessons within a school year, this study pointed to differences in stability across the four MQI dimensions as captured in both lesson-level variance and time trends; variations in observational scores were also found when considering different content areas. Additionally, teacher mathematical knowledge for teaching was positively related to teachers’ scores. In discussing these findings, we consider their implications for teacher evaluation systems.

Authors

• Charalambos Y. Charalambous, University of Cyprus

• Sofia Agathangelou, University of Cyprus