Effective Methods of Measuring Teachers’ Impact on Student Learning

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Few education issues are raising more questions and greater interest than that of how the nation should fairly and accurately evaluate teachers and assess their influence on student performance. And few issues are more important. To help better understand how teachers are assessed in this new era of school improvement, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards convened a task force of leaders in education evaluation, research, and policy to debate and share their collective knowledge about teacher evaluation.

The resulting report, Student Learning, Student Achievement: How Do Teachers Measure Up?, outlines effective methods of using student learning as a measure of teacher effectiveness. The full report and the executive summary provides principles for selecting and using large-scale assessments to evaluate teacher practice. Additionally, it offers recommendations about how the National Board Certification process can be used more effectively to measure accomplished teachers’ contributions to student learning and how those lessons can be shared with the field. The report provides guidance to educators and policymakers about appropriate ways to ground teacher evaluation in student learning.

In the most rigorous and comprehensive study to date about National Board Certification, the National Research Council found that students taught by National Board Certified Teachers make higher gains on achievement tests than students taught by teachers who have not applied and those who did not achieve certification.