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What Do Test Scores Miss?

A new study by IPR labor and education economist Kirabo Jackson finds other indicators of long-term student success

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Teachers are more than educational-outcome machines—they are leaders who can guide students toward a purposeful adulthood. This analysis provided the first hard evidence that such contributions to student progress are both measurable and consequential.”

Kirabo Jackson
Professor of human development and social policy and an IPR fellow

 teacher and student
IPR labor and education economist Kirabo Jackston finds that a teacher's ability to cultivate non-cognitive skills is a better indicator of a student's long-term success than test scores.

Test scores alone can’t identify the teachers who have the biggest impact on students, according to a new study by IPR labor and education economist Kirabo Jackson.

Jackson’s research suggests that teachers’ ability to cultivate non-cognitive skills—traits such as adaptability, motivation, and self-restraint—is a far better indicator of a student’s long-term success than their impact on standardized test scores, according to the study published online in the Journal of Political Economy.

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Kirabo Jackson

“Teachers are more than educational-outcome machines—they are leaders who can guide students toward a purposeful adulthood,” Jackson wrote in EducationNext. “This analysis provided the first hard evidence that such contributions to student progress are both measurable and consequential.”

Jackson, a professor of human development and social policy at the School of Education and Social Policy and fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, used a robust data set on 9th-grade students in North Carolina to look broadly at how teachers affect students’ development across a range of both academic and non-cognitive skills.

After creating a way to measure so-called “soft skills” based on suspensions, timely grade promotions and other factors, Jackson rated teachers’ impacts on both test scores and behaviors and looked for connections between the two.

He found that teachers’ influence on non-cognitive skills was 10 times more predictive of students' long-term success in high school than their effect on standardized test scores.

While test scores have an important role in evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness, “to fully assess teacher performance, policymakers should consider measures of a broad range of student skills, classroom observations, and responsiveness to feedback alongside effectiveness ratings based on test scores,” Jackson wrote.

“We cannot identify the teachers who matter most by using test-score impacts alone, because many teachers who raise test scores do not improve non-cognitive skills, and vice versa,” he said.

Kirabo Jackson is Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and IPR fellow.

This article was written by Julie Deardorff and originally appeared on sesp.northwestern.edu.

Published: November 28, 2018.