Abstract:

Error-component analysists argue that after netting out the effects of student background, teacher credentials and school characteristics, the residuals of test scores generated by subtracting predicted values from the class-level mean can be regarded as teachers’ effect on pupils’ achievement. The paper tests this idea by using self-collected teacher-student matched data from Hubei and Guangdong province. Residual analyses show that, (1) Marginal effects of teaching performance of teachers instructing Chinese Language Art, Math and English are among 0.3?0.5 standard deviations, among which the magnitude of Math teachers’ effect is the largest. (2) There are huge individual differences among teachers in terms of teaching performance. If a teacher of average quality were replaced by the most effective one, the whole class would witness a net gain of 0.3?1.0 standard deviations. On the contrary, if he or she were replaced by the worst colleague, mean performance of the class he or she taught would go down by 0.5?0.7 standard deviations. Policy implications of this article are obvious with regard to evaluating teachers’ performance.

Key words: teacher assessment, teaching performance, students’ academic achievement, residual analysis