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Evaluating Teacher Quality

Social Sciences Conference May 4, 2017 Madrid

General information

Venue: Fundación Ramón Areces, Vitruvio, 5. 28006. Madrid
Limited capacity

Free registration

Organized by:

Fundación Ramón Areces

In cooperation with:

Fundación Europea Sociedad y Educación

Programme

Recent research in economics shows that teachers are by far the most important school-based determinant of students' educational success. This implies that raising teacher quality is crucial for any education system which hopes to improve its students' learning outcomes. Distinguishing good teachers from bad teachers is difficult, however, because easily observable characteristics such as teachers' educational qualifications are not robustly related to student learning. In response to this understanding, schools around the world have started to evaluate teachers based on their ability to increase student performance on standardized tests from one school year to the next, a measure called "teacher value-added." Importantly, teachers with higher value-added not only improve their students' test performance, but also their long-term educational attainment and wages. Policies aiming to increase teacher quality based on value-added measures range from firing low-value-added teachers to mentoring of these teachers by higher-quality peers.

Thursday, 4

19:30

Speaker:
Jan Bietenbeck
Assistant Professor of Economics. Lund University. Sweden.

Jan Bietenbeck: is Assistant Professor of Economics at Lund University in Sweden and Research Affiliate at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany. His research centers on topics in the economics of education, including the determinants of teacher quality, the influence of class peers on learning outcomes, and educational production in developing countries. Bietenbeck received his PhD in Economics from the Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros (CEMFI) in Madrid in 2015. He has won several research awards, most recently the prize for the best dissertation in economics of education of the German Economic Association.