In fall 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project 
to identify the most accurate measures of effective teaching practice. Although teacher quality has been identified as the most important factor in student achievement, there has been little research in how to accurately measure it. The MET project will spend $45 million to test and validate multiple measures in isolation and in combination: value-added teacher effects on test scores, student perception data using surveys, teacher observation ratings using a variety of teaching frameworks, and teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and their perceptions of their working conditions.
An eagerly anticipated report was released in December with preliminary findings from the first year of the study.
Value-added measures have merit despite volatility. Despite contradictory research on value-added measures (see “The good, the bad, and the ugly on the use of value-added modeling” from the November 2010 issue of HR Exchange) MET researchers found that in every grade and subject, a teacher’s value-added track record is among the strongest predictors of their students’ gains in other classes and academic years. Although value-added measures did show volatility from year-to-year and class-to-class, that volatility was not so large as to undercut the usefulness of value-added measures.
High value-added teachers are not just “teaching to the test.” Critics have speculated that high value-added teachers are simply coaching students to do well on state tests. But researchers found that teachers with high value-added on state tests tend to promote deeper conceptual understanding as well.
Teachers have larger effects on math achievement than on reading or English Language Arts. Researchers hypothesize that these effects may be attributed to the limitation of current state ELA tests and will examine this issue in more depth.
Student perceptions of a teacher’s strengths and weaknesses are consistent across different groups and are related to achievement gains. Student feedback is widely used in higher education but rarely in elementary and secondary schools. Using a student perceptions survey based on the Tripod Project for School Improvement, students responded anonymously to questions related to seven areas: care, control, clarify, challenge, captivate, confer, and consolidate. Researchers found that students’ perception of a teacher’s ability to control a classroom and to challenge students with rigorous work were most important.
Results of the MET research so far show that two types of evidence—student achievement gains and student feedback—do seem to point in the same direction, with teachers performing better on one measure tending to perform better on the other measures. Other measures, including classroom observation rubrics and teacher knowledge and perceptions, will be added to future reports.
The first report focused on measures of student achievement gains and student perceptions of the classroom environment based on nearly 3,000 teachers in six urban school districts across the country, including Dallas ISD. A second report will be released this spring with a third and final report expected in the winter of 2011-12.
—Learning about Teaching Policy Brief, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, December 2010.
—“Gates Study Offers Teacher-Effectiveness Clues,” by Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week, Dec. 10, 2010.
