Publications

How should schools measure a teacher’s (or a team of teachers’) job performance? How should job performance affect compensation, promotion, or other rewards and sanctions for teachers? How should schools provide performance feedback to teachers? Should...

This research brief describes preliminary results from our study of Skew The Script (STS), a nonprofit organization working to increase math achievement by creating “genuinely relevant math lessons.” STS develops lesson plans, materials, and assignments...

We study the returns to experience in teaching, estimated using supervisor ratings from classroom observations. We describe the assumptions required to interpret changes in observation ratings over time as the causal effect of experience on performance...

When employees expect evaluation and performance incentives will continue (or begin) in the future, the potential future rewards create an incentive to invest in relevant skills today. Because skills benefit job performance, the effects of evaluation can...

Evaluation and training are important features of the employment relationship between teachers and the schools they work for. The first feature, evaluation, involves performance measures and often performance incentives linked to those measures, like...

We study teachers’ choices about how to allocate class time across different instructional activities, for example, lecturing, open discussion, or individual practice. Our data come from secondary schools in England, specifically classes preceding GCSE...

We document measurable, lasting gains in student achievement caused by a change in teachers’ evaluation incentives. A short-lived rule created a discontinuity in teachers’ incentives when allocating effort across their assigned students: students who...

This paper reports on a field experiment in 82 high schools trialing a low-cost intervention in schools’ operations: teachers working in the same school observed and scored each other’s teaching. Students in treatment schools scored 0.07σ higher on math...

We study a program designed to encourage learning from coworkers among school teachers. In an experiment, we document gains in job performance when high- and low-skilled teachers are paired and asked to work together on improving their skills. Pairs are...

I study the effects of a labor-replacing computer technology on the productivity of classroom teachers. In a series of field-experiments, teachers were provided computer-aided instruction (CAI) software for use in their classrooms; CAI provides...

Selecting more productive employees among a pool of job applicants can be a cost-effective means of improving organizational performance and may be particularly important in the public sector. We study the relationship among applicant characteristics...

I study how teachers’ assigned job tasks—the basic practices they are asked to use in the classroom—affect the returns to math skills in teacher productivity. The results demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between workers’ skills and workers’...

In this Getting Down to Facts report we focus on teacher evaluation programs, and further focus on the features of evaluation programs which may promote or hinder teachers’ effectiveness in their work.

Class size is a first-order consideration in the study of education cost and effectiveness. Yet little is known about the effects of class size on student outcomes in online college classes, even though online courses have become commonplace in many...

Online college courses are a rapidly expanding feature of higher education, yet little research identifies their effects relative to traditional in-person classes. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that taking a course online, instead of...

We examine graduate student teaching as an input to two production processes: the education of undergraduates and the development of graduate students themselves. Using fluctuations in full-time faculty availability as an instrument, we find...

For students whose math skills lag expectations, public schools often increase the fraction of the school day spent on math instruction. Studying middle-school students and using regression discontinuity methods, I estimate the causal effect of requiring...

Broad-access higher education institutions play a large and increasing role in American human capital development, yet our knowledge of how these institutions function and of the factors that contribute to their effectiveness is sparse. If instructors and...

We examine how employers learn about worker productivity in a randomized pilot experiment which provided objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals. We test several hypotheses that support a simple Bayesian learning model with...

Teacher performance evaluation has become a dominant theme in school reform efforts. Yet, whether evaluation changes the performance of teachers, the focus of this paper, is unknown. Instead, evaluation has largely been studied as an input to selective...

Research continues to find large differences in student achievement gains across teachers’ classrooms. The variability in teacher effectiveness raises the stakes on identifying effective teachers and teaching practices. This paper combines data from...