Best evidence in brief: Do teachers get better with more experience?

I don’t want to know what you will think about our family, but my wife and I had some discussion lately about the role of experience in the effectiveness of teachers – we do other topics too, trust me. Luckily there is now a new research review mentioned in the new Best Evidence in Brief :

The Learning Policy Institute has published a review of research into teacher effectiveness as teachers become more experienced. The review takes advantage of advances in research methods and data systems that have allowed researchers to more accurately answer this question. Specifically, by including teacher fixed effects in their analyses, researchers have been able to compare a teacher with multiple years of experience to that same teacher when he or she had fewer years of experience.

The report reviews 30 studies published within the last 15 years that analyze the effect of teaching experience on student outcomes in the United States. The review concludes that:

• Teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career. Gains in teacher effectiveness associated with experience are most steep in teachers’ initial years, but continue to be significant as teachers reach the second, and often third, decades of their careers.

• As teachers gain experience, their students not only learn more, as measured by standardized tests, they are also more likely to do better on other measures of success, such as school attendance.

• Teachers’ effectiveness increases at a greater rate when they teach in a supportive and collegial working environment, and when they accumulate experience in the same grade level, subject, or district.

• More experienced teachers support greater student learning for their colleagues and the school as a whole, as well as for their own students.