The teacher pipeline in Washington State: Examining the transition from student teaching to the classroom and implications for student achievement
2015-2020
Smith Richardson Foundation
A comprehensive study of the teacher education pipeline that will connect detailed information about pre-service teacher education experiences—such as transcript and student teaching data—to various teacher outcomes. The heart of our proposal is the development of a “Teacher Education Learning Collaborative” (TELC) that includes every teacher education program (TEP) in Washington State. We will work with institutions in the TELC to build a detailed dataset that will contain information on the pre-service and student teaching experiences of every prospective teacher in Washington State.
Exploring the impact of student teaching apprenticeships on student achievement and mentor teachers.
Goldhaber, D., Krieg, J., & Theobald, R.
We exploit within-teacher variation in the years that math and reading teachers in grades 4–8 host an apprentice (“student teacher”) in Washington State to estimate the causal effect of these apprenticeships on student achievement, both during the apprenticeship and afterwards. While the average causal effect of hosting a student teacher on student performance in the year of the apprenticeship is indistinguishable from zero in both math and reading, hosting a student teacher is found to have modest positive impacts on student math and reading achievement in a teacher’s classroom in following years. These findings suggest that schools and districts can participate in the student teaching process without fear of short-term decreases in student test scores while potentially gaining modest long-term test score increases.
Goldhaber, D., Krieg, J., & Theobald, R. (2020). Exploring the impact of student teaching apprenticeships on student achievement and mentor teachers. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 13(2), 213-234.