ASU Economics Professor Margarita Pivovarova on Northwestern Economics Professors Kirabo Jackson’s VAM Study
A “recent” (2012) economics-based study has recently come to VAMmers’ attention, about effective teachers’ effects on students’ non-cognitive skills, with evidence supporting that teachers’ effects on non-cognitive skills matter more than test scores. Given the econometric approach of the author, I invited my colleague — ASU Assistant Professor of Education Economics, Margarita Pivovarova — to give us a review of the study. She writes:
“Going back to the debate about what constitutes a “good” or “effective” teacher and whether value-added based on test scores alone could potentially capture all about which we care in a “good” or “effective” teacher when we find one, a working paper released back in 2012 in the National Bureau of Education Researh (NBER) series on economics of education (a paper, though, recently reviewed here in the Better Living through Mathematics blog and recently reviewed here in Diane Ravitch’s blog) takes a big leap forward in that discussion and provides empirical evidence that not all value-added are created equal. The paper, titled “Non-Cognitive Ability, Test Scores, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from 9th Grade Teachers in North Carolina” is available here.
C. Kirabo Jackson, an Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, proposes and empirically estimates (i.e., using actual data from North Carolina) a model that assumes that teachers may affect not only test scores, but also non-cognitive abilities of their students, and that these two effects may not overlap within the same teacher. In other words, a teacher who is very good at boosting test scores may not be the one who has high value-added in the behavioral and social skills domain. The ASU Economics Professor Margarita Pivovarova on Northwestern Economics Professors Kirabo Jackson’s VAM Study |: