Study reveals a teacher's effectiveness greatly impacts student's achievement

Teachers play an important role in building a child's success in their first years of school. A recent study finds ways to increase the effectiveness of teachers by reforming hiring practices and finding new methods on teacher training and development.

In the education process, the effectiveness of the teacher is the most important component for pupil attainment. Economist Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol, suggests that in the US, replacing the least effective 8 per cent of teachers with average teachers has a present value of USD 100 trillion.

Having a good understanding of how teacher's effectiveness can be measured, the study carried by IZA World of Labour stresses the importance of politicians to find ways to raise the efficiency of teachers.

A collective study cited by Burgess from different countries by assigning an experimental assignment to teachers during classes showed that variations in teacher effectiveness are extremely important in understanding pupil's attainment.

In fact, there is no such attribute of schools that comes close to having this much influence on students' achievement.

Out of many studies, one study estimates that replacing the 5 per cent least effective teachers with average teachers would yield around $9000 per classroom per year in future pupil earnings due to better education.

Higher the effectiveness in teachers, higher the earnings of the pupil and are the ones more likely to go to better university and to live in richer neighborhoods.

Given the fact that more studies need to be done to analyse the area more, Burgess points out three areas in particular that seem to hold the greatest promise when it comes to improving teacher's effectiveness:

* Improving teacher selection and hiring procedures

* Reforming teacher contracts and the tenure/retention decision

* Re-thinking teacher professional development

Burgess says: "Teacher effectiveness should be a central concern for education policymakers ... The potential size of the impact of improving teacher effectiveness represents a truly grand prize for the countries, cities, and schools which manage to crack the code of how to raise teacher effectiveness."

( With inputs from ANI )