Do Teacher Credentials and Characteristics Affect Teacher Effectiveness in High School Economics?

We use student-level administrative data from Georgia to examine how teacher characteristics affect student learning. Specifically, we examine students’ normalized end-of-course test scores for a required high school economics course. We develop two models. First, we examine returns to activities often linked to teacher effectiveness—experience, advanced degrees, National Board Certification, and curriculum-specific in-service workshops. Second, we investigate the importance of having teachers share characteristics with their students. Similar to many studies before us, we find little systematic link between any of the observable teacher characteristics and better student outcomes once we control for unobservable teacher characteristics. Of note, we do find that female students tend to perform better with female teachers than with male teachers. Overall, the results highlight the difficulty in relying on just one specific measure of teacher quality to ensure student performance. JEL Classifications: A13, A21, I24

Intensive online foreign language learning at the advanced level

Hybrid and online foreign language courses are becoming increasingly more important for students. However, several gaps in the literature point to needing studies investigating courses taught online, at the advanced level, and during intensive summer timeframes, since these classes can be advantageous for learners. This paper discusses an advanced-level online Spanish grammar course that was taught during the summer, and examines: (1) learning gains from a beginning-ofcourse test to end-of-course test (i.e., a pretest-posttest covering course content), and (2) students’ perceptions of the course gleaned from an end-of-course survey, which collected both quantitative and qualitative data. The pretest-posttest results showed a significant improvement in learners’ scores, and the survey results indicated mixed opinions. Specifically, positive course attributes included the course’s self-paced nature and practical benefits, however the course’s fast-paced nature may have led to several drawbacks. These findings offer insight into these types of courses, and may prove helpful for instructors who want to plan similar classes.

Technology in the Aid of Delivering Economic Content to Teachers: Virtual Economics v. 3

We examine the impact on student achievement of a face-to-face teacher workshop that also provides economics instructors with access to an electronic library of instructional and reference material for their economics classroom—Virtual Economics v. 3 (VE3), offered by the Council for Economic Education. Based on evidence using student and teacher-level administrative data from the Georgia Department of Education and controlling for students’ prior achievement in mathematics, we find evidence that the VE3 workshop experience increases student achievement in high school economics. Our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that teacher participation in the VE3 workshop increases student achievement by 0.061 standard deviations on Georgia’s high stakes economics end-of-course test. Future research should seek estimating the effect of treatments in education such as theVE3workshop using randomized controlled trials (RCT).