Teacher Characteristics and Their Effects on Student Test Scores: A Systematic Review

Abstract

It has become widely accepted that teachers are important in facilitating student learning. Hundreds of empirical studies have tried to explain differences in student performance by evaluating the impact of particular teacher characteristics. Yet, this topic has not been the subject of a systematic review for more than 10 years, even though most of the empirical evidence has emerged over the past decade. This study provides an up-to-date review, drawing on empirical findings from several countries and distinguishing between acquired and sociodemographic teacher characteristics. This review confirms the existing consensus that subject-related degrees and knowledge, and not general teacher certifications, are positively related to student performance and particularly so for Master's degrees in math and science. A new insight is that recent findings point out that teacher experience continues to contribute to student test scores throughout a teacher's career, instead of merely the first few years. An important future research avenue would be to examine which mechanisms can explain these teacher characteristic effects.

What drives the performance of Swedish lower secondary schools?

“…School competition negatively affects results in schools with the least favourable socioeconomic mix of pupils, although only weakly. This result is opposite to the results found by Wondratschek, Edmark and Frölich (2013[12]), and Böhlmark and Lindahl (2015 [11]). Both these studies analysed older data, ending in 2006 and 2009, respectively.…”

“…In SFA, their weaker performance is rather reflected in higher inefficiency scores. 11 The lambda coefficient, which is the ratio of the variances of the asymmetric and symmetric errors, is significantly different from zero at the 1% confidence level, indicating that inefficiencies are present and validating the use of an SFA model. Average inefficiency is slightly below 10% and the distribution of efficiency scores is fairly narrow (Figure 1).…”

“…As a consistency check, the share of students attending private schools within a municipality is included as an alternative competition measure, following Böhlmark and Lindahl (2015 [11]).…”

“…Some authors have argued that teacher gender could influence student test scores. However, a recent literature review suggests such effect is absent, at least in European countries(Coenen et al, 2018). 14 Graciously provided by the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen).…”

Hot for Teacher

“…In terms of the quality of teachers, the main challenge facing policy makers aiming to increase teacher quality is that there are few observable characteristics that are related to teacher quality (Hanushek & Rivkin, 2006;Coenen et al, 2018). If teacher quality would be easy to predict based on personal attributes, schools and teacher training programs could select students based on these characteristics in order to increase the quality of the teacher corps.…”