PROFESSORS IMPACT ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Professors Impact on Student Achievement

Professors Impact on Student Achievement

Introduction

Teaching is the central task colleges and universities perform for students. Policy administrators often emphasize teaching as the key determinant to a college student's academic experience and successful transition into the labour force. Many university and college mission statements declare that graduates should leave with strong analytical abilities, communication skills, and be primed for fulfilling careers. Students themselves, on the other hand, often complain colorfully in teaching evaluations about how ineffective some instructors have been in helping them meet these goals. Studies that examine the relationship between teacher quality and longer-run outcomes, such as earnings, find more consistent evidence that teacher quality matters. Test score improvement differs substantially for students with different teachers, but in the same school and grade. This paper contributes to the literature about the importance of teacher quality in several ways. It focuses on the effects of teacher quality at the college level.

Background information

Students evaluate instructors across a variety of traits, and measuring subjective quality in terms of the portion of students that provides particularly high or low evaluations may be more informative than summarizing quality using the mean across students, University teachers may matter in ways not captured by the observable differences we use above to estimate effects on student achievement. At the primary and secondary level, several researchers have measured teacher specific fixed effects (or value added) on student performance, and conclude that the effects differ across teachers in significant ways. Value added is the expected increase or decrease in a student's outcome from attending a class with a particular instructor, relative to the mean outcome.

Purposes of the action research project, Hypothesis

In this paper, we address the question whether Professors teaching performance impacts student achievement. Among currently acceptable university instructors matter to students' achievement and course interest. To analyze this, we use a new administrative dataset of students at a large Canadian university matched to first year courses and corresponding instructors. Instructor quality is measured by objective, subjective, and value added measures. We identify our estimates using variation across different sections within the same course. The within-course analysis provides an intuitive counterfactual estimate of how different a student's subsequent achievement would be expected to be if she enrolled in the same course but with a different type of instructor. To control for individual specific characteristics and selection behavior we include student fixed effects. Remaining selection on teacher quality is likely to be small since, for many first-year courses, instructors are not listed in course calendars and students must pick the courses we match to (as of September 1) with little or no prior knowledge about instructors. We also control for time of day and week controls to minimize remaining selection issues.

Research questions

Why do some students who are not very bright otherwise start to perform in those classes where porofessors take special interest in boosting their performance?

What makes professors go the extra mile to work on the enhancement of ...