Measuring teacher ability to predict student success in solving specific mathematics problems

This report describes efforts to measure teachers’ knowledge of their own students’ abilities in mathematics. We refer to the assessment instrument described in this report as the Teacher Ability to Predict Student Success (TAPSS) instrument. The purpose of this report is to describe the data-collection procedures we used in our attempts to measure teacher judgment accuracy. The present report provides a description of the sample, a description of the study design and its realization, and descriptive statistics. The analytic sample for the spring 2014 wave of data collection involved grade 1 and grade 2 students (n = 504) and their mathematics teachers (n = 146). The analytic sample for the 2015 wave of data collection included a larger sample of students (n = 785) and their teachers (n = 200). For each student and item, the teachers predicted whether the student would solve the item correctly. Overall, teachers accurately predicted their students' performance about 60% of the time. Overprediction was more common than underproduction. We anticipate that teacher judgment accuracy will ultimately yield important insight into the elusive link between teacher knowledge and student learning. During each wave of data collection, teachers were shown a set of problems from the interview and were told which students would be attempting to solve the problems. The work described here was completed as part of a randomized controlled trial evaluating the implementation and impact of a teacher professional-development program called Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI). We anticipate that data generated with the TAPSS instrument will be used to determine the effects of the teacher professional-development program on teacher judgment accuracy and the extent to which this type of knowledge is associated with student learning. The TAPSS instrument and the sample described here represent several advancements in the field of measuring teacher judgment accuracy, including the iterative development of a new instrument available to researchers and program evaluators.