Learn: The AI education emergency

What teachers do that a computer cannot

The short answer

Teachers change far more than test scores. They move attendance, behavior and graduation; warm relationships go with engagement; a teacher's encouragement changes how students revise their work; counselors move college-going; and a teacher's enjoyment spreads to the class. AI teaches the lesson. Teachers teach the person.

Teachers change more than test scores

Ninth grade teachers in North Carolina changed students' absences, suspensions, course grades and on-time progress, and those effects predicted high school completion and college-going beyond what their effect on test scores predicted nber.org. Students assigned to high value-added teachers in primary school were more likely to attend college and earned more as adults nber.org.

Behavior and belonging

Upper-elementary teachers have large effects on students' confidence in math and on their happiness and behavior in class, and those outcomes track the teacher's emotional support and classroom organization annenberg.brown.edu. Across 99 studies from preschool to high school, warm teacher-student relationships went with higher engagement and achievement research.vu.nl. These are associations, not experiments.

When researchers coached 78 secondary teachers to improve how they interact with students, in a randomized trial with 2,237 students, achievement rose by the equivalent of moving the average student from the 50th to the 59th percentile pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

Social and emotional learning

A meta-analysis of 213 school programs with 270,034 students found social and emotional learning programs raised achievement by 11 percentile points over controls pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. A follow-up meta-analysis of 82 programs found benefits still visible 6 months to 18 years later pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

Encouragement

When a teacher's critical feedback on 7th graders' essays came with a note stressing high standards and belief that the student could meet them, students were more likely to revise and wrote better final drafts sparq.stanford.edu. In Gallup's 2016 student poll, 71% of fifth graders strongly agreed they have a teacher who makes them excited about the future, compared with 44% of 11th graders news.gallup.com.

Counseling and role models

School counselors in Massachusetts differed widely in how much they raised graduation and college attendance, by about as much as teachers do aeaweb.org. Black students randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in kindergarten to grade 3 were 9 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school nber.org.

Making learning fun

In 71 math classrooms in grades 7 and 8, teachers who enjoyed teaching had students who enjoyed math more, through how enthusiastic students saw the teacher to be kops.uni-konstanz.de.

Sources

  1. C. Kirabo Jackson, "What Do Test Scores Miss? The Importance of Teacher Effects on Non-Test Score Outcomes," Journal of Political Economy 126(5), 2018 (NBER Working Paper 22226). nber.org
  2. Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman and Jonah E. Rockoff, "Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II," American Economic Review 104(9), 2014 (NBER Working Paper 19424). nber.org
  3. David Blazar and Matthew A. Kraft, "Teacher and Teaching Effects on Students' Attitudes and Behaviors," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 2017. annenberg.brown.edu
  4. Roorda, Koomen, Spilt and Oort, "The Influence of Affective Teacher-Student Relationships on Students' School Engagement and Achievement," Review of Educational Research 81, 2011. research.vu.nl
  5. Allen, Pianta, Gregory, Mikami and Lun, "An Interaction-Based Approach to Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement," Science 333(6045), August 19, 2011. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  6. Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor and Schellinger, "The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning," Child Development 82(1), 2011. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  7. Taylor, Oberle, Durlak and Weissberg, "Promoting Positive Youth Development Through School-Based Social and Emotional Learning Interventions," Child Development 88(4), 2017. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  8. Yeager et al., "Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(2), 2014. sparq.stanford.edu
  9. Valerie J. Calderon, Gallup, "Keep Kids Excited About School," June 8, 2017 (2016 Gallup Student Poll). news.gallup.com
  10. Christine Mulhern, "Beyond Teachers: Estimating Individual School Counselors' Effects on Educational Attainment," American Economic Review 113(11), 2023. aeaweb.org
  11. Gershenson, Hart, Hyman, Lindsay and Papageorge, "The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 14(4), 2022 (NBER Working Paper 25254). nber.org
  12. Frenzel, Goetz, Lüdtke, Pekrun and Sutton, "Emotional Transmission in the Classroom," Journal of Educational Psychology 101(3), 2009. kops.uni-konstanz.de

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