Teacher training, mentoring or performance support systems?

Abstract

A major challenge in education is how to improve teaching. This means improving teaching so that all students effectively achieve the levels of performance stipulated in the curriculum and that they do so within the specified timeframes. This goal is particularly difficult to achieve in schools with students of low socioeconomic status. However, measuring the quality of instruction is not a straightforward task. This is partly due to a lack of rigorous and regular data on student performance gathered by independent third parties. On the other hand, there are several alternatives for improving teaching: teacher training, teacher mentoring programs and support systems to boost teacher performance. Our study looks at eight years of data on national standardized test scores for every school in a low SES district. We found that the effect size of a Performance Support System is larger than the benchmark effect sizes for teacher training and teacher mentoring programs.