Teacher Effectiveness

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Abe Lo (Author)

WHAT IS IT?

This model represents a hypothetical school. With a faculty with variable teacher quality and years of service, the model shows the impact of these two variables on their student learning. This student learning uses the three categories from standardized tests: advanced, proficient, and basic.

Each student will encounter 1 random teacher, and this contact represents a single academic year. This cycle will repeat for 12 cycles until each student has been taught 12 times. The model stops after each student has been taught 12 times.

HOW TO USE IT

Use the sliders to change the number of teachers/students and the maximum number of years of service and teacher quality. This model can help administrator_ evaluate whether it is better to have a staff of experienced teachers or whether it is better to pursue teacher_ who are known to be effective or the combination of the two variables.

Press "setup". The model starts with the students, who are represented at the beginning as white squares, and ten random teachers randomly spread throughout the "school".

Press "go". Upon contact with a teacher, the students are immediately impacted turning one of three colors: red (basic), yellow (proficient), and green (advanced) based upon their perceived learning. Each subsequent contact with a teacher continues to impact the student either raising or diminishing their learning outcome.

The monitor and graphs show the numbers and percentages of students who meet the basic, proficient, or advanced criteria given the variables selected by the user.

Press "reset" to clear the school and return the default number of students and teachers.

HOW IT WORKS

At the beginning of the model, the user defines the maximum value for the entire faculty's number of years of service and their teacher quality, which is measured on a scale of 0-100. Each teacher is then assigned a random value within those ranges. The teacher then has a variable called "teacher-value", which is a composite of their years of service and teacher-quality. This "teacher-value" factor is converted to a 0-3 scale.

Students have two variables "student-learning" and "times-taught". Students will randomly be placed in the school and encounter a random teacher. When they encounter a teacher, the teacher's "teacher value" will be added to the student's "student-learning" score, which is a very coarse measure of the student's ability to learn from that particular teacher. If the student has been taught more than once, the teacher's "teacher-value" score will be added to the student's current "student-learning" score.

Each time the student has been taught, the "times-taught" variable will increase by 1 and the student's color will change accordingly. To create a color scale, the "student-learning" score, which is a cumulative measure, is divided by the number of times that the student is taught to create a "score-by-color" variable that is on a scale between 0-3.

Score by Color Meaning Color

0 < 1 basic red

1 < x < 2 proficient yellow

2 < x < 3 advanced green

The simulation will stop after each student in the model has been taught 12 times.

The monitors and graph show the number of advanced, proficient, and basic over time.

The number of teachers and students can be changed using the sliders. In this current version of the model, we have not accounted for a relationship between achievement and the teacher-student ratio.

THINGS TO NOTICE

By playing with the variables, can you make the number of advanced students increase? Can you make this happen on a regular basis? Does this model help you make sense of the real world? Do you get a consistently larger affect when you increase the YEARS-OF-SERVICE or when you increase the TEACHER-QUALITY? How do you explain this? Do you think this is accurate? Why?

THINGS TO TRY

In this model there are two variables that can affect the overall outcome of student learning: the YEARS-OF-SERVICE, and TEACHER-QUALITY. Look for patterns in how these variables affect the student graduation outcomes. Which variable has the greatest effect? Do the patterns make sense?

Set YEARS-OF-SERVICE to zero. What happens to the student outcomes? Next investigate what happens when you increase YEARS-OF-SERVICE while the model runs. Does it ever affect the number of proficient graduates? How can you get more advanced graduates? Now investigate what happens when you hold YEARS-OF-SERVICE steady but change the teacher quality; is there more of an effect on the number of proficient and advanced learners?

How might increasing the number of teachers and students affect the range of basic, proficient, and advanced students? Why? Is this effect similar to what we expect in real-life?

EXTENDING THE MODEL

In this model, we only chose to look at two measures. What variables other than TEACHER-QUALITY and YEARS-OF-SERVICE affect students' success in school? Can you incorporate one of them?

We had originally wanted the patches to represent the students to allow a greater number of students to be represented. Can you figure out a way to make this work to more fairly represent the relative numbers of teachers and students in a school?

Each student encounters a random teacher a long the way. Can you find a way to ensure that each teacher only teaches a particular student once?

Can you find a way to factor in the realistic effect of class size and the faculty-student ratio?

NETLOGO FEATURES

Breeds of teachers and students are turtles and used the "teachers-own" and "students-own" to represent breed-specific variables that could be changed upon interaction.

RELATED MODELS

Another simple model similar to this model is the El Farol model. To get ideas on how to extend this model and make it more realistic see the AIDS model.

CREDITS AND REFERENCES

Abe Lo and Barbara Labuhn

Northwestern University

Comments and Questions

Spoorthi Guttikonda

Why is the years of service and teacher quality divided by 40 to calculate the teacher value?

Posted almost 9 years ago

Click to Run Model

breed [teachers teacher]
breed [students student]

students-own [
  times-taught
  student-learning
  score-for-color]

teachers-own [teacher-value]

to setup
  ca
  setup-teacher
  setup-students
end 

to reset
  ca
  set number-teachers 10
  set number-students 100
end 

to setup-teacher
  set-default-shape teachers "person" 
  create-teachers number-teachers
  ask teachers [
    set color blue
    setxy random-xcor random-ycor
    set teacher-value ((random years-of-service + random teacher-quality) / 40)
  ]
end 

to setup-students ;; students
  set-default-shape students "square"
  create-students number-students
  ask students [
    set color white
    setxy random-xcor random-ycor
    set times-taught 0
    set student-learning 0
  ]
end 

to start-model
  if all? students [times-taught = 12] [stop]
  move
  teach
  do-total-plots
end 

to move
  ask turtles [
    right random 360
    forward 1
  ]
end 

to teach
  ask students [
    teach-student
    color-change
  ]
end 

to teach-student;; asked to the student
    let current-teacher one-of teachers-here ;; student "grabs" random teacher
    if current-teacher != nobody;; did we get one?  if so,
    [
      ifelse times-taught > 11 [stop] [set times-taught (times-taught + 1)];; we only want the students
      ;; to be taught up to 12 times
      set student-learning (student-learning + [teacher-value] of current-teacher)
      ;; shows the learning of the students due to the instruction of the teacher
      if times-taught > 1 [
        set score-for-color (student-learning / times-taught)
   
        ;; considers the average student-learning accounting over the course of their education
      ]
    ]
end 

to color-change
  if (score-for-color < 1) [set color red];; basic
  if (score-for-color > 1) and (score-for-color < 2) [set color yellow];; proficient
  if (score-for-color > 2) and (score-for-color <= 3) [set color green];; advanced
end 

to do-total-plots
  set-current-plot "Totals"
  set-current-plot-pen "advanced"
  plot count students with [color = green]
  set-current-plot-pen "proficient"
  plot count students with [color = yellow]
  set-current-plot-pen "basic"
  plot count students with [color = red]
end

There are 2 versions of this model.

		Uploaded by	When	Description	Download
		Abe Lo	over 14 years ago	No description provided	Download this version
		Abe Lo	over 14 years ago	Initial upload	Download this version

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