After graduating next fall, Mandy Strahl hopes to land a job teaching first grade classes next August. At that time, the education senior’s effectiveness in the classroom will begin to be monitored through the tracking of her students’ progress each school year.
When all Louisiana university and college education departments’ teacher preparation programs underwent a redesign in 2003, a study of new teachers’ effectiveness in public school classrooms began. The study compares the effectiveness of new teachers to that of experienced teachers.
The Value-Added Teacher Preparation Assessment Model was commissioned by the Louisiana Board of Regents and developed by George Noell, psychology professor and the study’s primary investigator.
“It looks at the achievement of students across the state based on standardized test scores, and then looks at the teachers who taught them to evaluate the effectiveness of a given program,” said Kevin Hardy, communication director of the Louisiana Board of Regents.
Strahl said she is unsure of what the teacher preparation program was like before redesign, but the workload is very time-consuming now.
“There’s a lot more work than I thought a teacher did when I was in elementary school,” Strahl said. “We’re always finding ways to make the lessons more fun and more creative.”
Noell and his research team looked at more than 400,000 data links between teachers and student scores in math, science and social studies. The four-year study examined scores of fourth through ninth graders in 68 public school districts and 13 training program at Louisiana colleges, universities and alternative education programs.
“The whole point is to figure out, if certain teacher preparation programs are doing particularly well, what are they doing? How can others do the same?” Noell said. “It’s a strengths and weaknesses assessment.”
Only three alternate certification programs produced enough graduates thus far that show the results of the redesign mandate. Noell said the data available for the effectiveness of new programs will begin to multiply in the next few years as students who began their college careers in the post-redesign curriculum graduate.
The three programs that produced enough teachers that met all criteria were Northwestern State University, Louisiana College, and The New Teacher Project.
These alternative certification programs are shorter by two or three years because they are for students who have already graduated in a specific field such as math or science and want to become certified to teach that subject.
According to the Value-Added Teacher Preparation Overview 2006 – 2007, graduates of those programs were as effective or more effective than their experienced colleagues.
The study classified the results of all the schools they studied in five levels. Level one includes programs in which evidence showed new teachers are more effective than experienced teachers, and level five includes programs that are significantly less effective.
“Although the results for LSU are from the pre-redesigned program, LSU came out well,” Noell said.
According to the study results, LSU graduates were most effective in teaching social studies and science, and third in math with LSU-Shreveport in first place and University of New Orleans in second.
Although Strahl said she believes new teachers are often as effective or more effective than experienced teachers because they are fresh out of school, she said her training in the post-redesign education program has already significantly helped at least one of her students.
“I teach a class every week and tutor a little girl in reading at Highland Elementary School,” Strahl said. “She’s in the first grade and since August when I started working with her, she has advanced to a fourth grade reading level. I think that’s pretty good.”
——Contact Olivia Hernandez at [email protected]