The MET Research Paper: Achievement of What?
by Diana SenechalDecember 19th, 2010
A new study by the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, finds that students’ perceptions of their teachers correlate with the teachers’ value-added scores; in other words, “students seem to know effective teaching when they experience it.” The correlation is stronger for mathematics than for ELA; this is one of many discrepancies between math and ELA in the study. According to the authors, “outside the early elementary grades when students are first learning to read, teachers may have limited impacts on general reading comprehension.” This peculiar observation should raise questions about curriculum, but curriculum does not come up in the report.
When the researchers combined student feedback and math value-added (from state tests) into a single score, they found that “the difference between bottom and top quartile was .21 student standard deviations, roughly equivalent to 7.49 months of schooling in a