Foreign Study
Foreign study
Donald Medley, Homer Coker, and Robert Soar (1984) describe succinctly the modern history of formal teacher evaluation–that period from the turn of the twentieth century to about 1980. This history might be divided into three overlapping periods: (1) The Search for Great Teachers; (2) Inferring Teacher Quality from Student Learning; and (3) Examining Teaching Performance. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, teacher evaluation appears to be entering a new phase of disequilibrium; that is, a transition to a period of Evaluating Teaching as Professional Behavior.
The Search for Great Teachers began in earnest in 1896 with the report of a study conducted by H.E. Kratz. Kratz asked 2,411 students from the second through the eighth grades in Sioux City, Iowa, to describe the characteristics of their best teachers. Kratz thought that by making desirable characteristics explicit he could establish a benchmark against which all teachers might be judged. Some 87 percent of those young Iowans mentioned "helpfulness" as the most important teacher characteristic. But a stunning 58 percent mentioned "personal appearance" as the next most influential factor.
Arvil Barr's 1948 compendium of research on teaching competence noted that supervisors' ratings of teachers were the metric of choice. A few researchers, however, examined average gains in student achievement for the purpose of Inferring Teacher Quality from Student Learning. They assumed, for good reason, that supervisors' opinions of teachers revealed little or nothing about student learning. Indeed, according to Medley and his colleagues, these early findings were "most discouraging." The average correlation between teacher characteristics and student learning, as measured most often by achievement tests, was zero. Some characteristics related positively to student achievement gains in one study and negatively in another study. Most showed no relation at all. Simeon J. Domas and David Tiedeman
Donald Medley, Homer Coker, and Robert Soar (1984) describe succinctly the modern history of formal teacher evaluation–that period from the turn of the twentieth century to about 1980. This history might be divided into three overlapping periods: (1) The Search for Great Teachers; (2) Inferring Teacher Quality from Student Learning; and (3) Examining Teaching Performance. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, teacher evaluation appears to be entering a new phase of disequilibrium; that is, a transition to a period of Evaluating Teaching as Professional Behavior.
The Search for Great Teachers began in earnest in 1896 with the report of a study conducted by H.E. Kratz. Kratz asked 2,411 students from the second through the eighth grades in Sioux City, Iowa, to describe the characteristics of their best teachers. Kratz thought that by making desirable characteristics explicit he could establish a benchmark against which all teachers might be judged. Some 87 percent of those young Iowans mentioned "helpfulness" as the most important teacher characteristic. But a stunning 58 percent mentioned "personal appearance" as the next most influential factor.
Arvil Barr's 1948 compendium of research on teaching competence noted that supervisors' ratings of teachers were the metric of choice. A few researchers, however, examined average gains in student achievement for the purpose of Inferring Teacher Quality from Student Learning. They assumed, for good reason, that supervisors' opinions of teachers revealed little or nothing about student learning. Indeed, according to Medley and his colleagues, these early findings were "most discouraging." The average correlation between teacher characteristics and student learning, as measured most often by achievement tests, was zero. Some characteristics related positively to student achievement gains in one study and negatively in another study. Most showed no relation at all. Simeon J. Domas and David Tiedeman