A new CALDER study examines whether student-teaching experience affects both later teaching effectiveness and the likelihood of leaving the profession.

Dan Goldhaber and colleagues analyzed data from six university-based teacher education programs in Washington State that, together, graduate roughly one-third of the state’s teachers. They assembled an impressive data set that included information on teacher candidates’ cooperating or supervising teachers and where their internships or student-teaching occurred; administrative data on race, gender, experience, educational background, and teaching endorsements; and data on the schools in which they were trained and the schools in which they were hired. The sample included individuals who had completed their student-teaching between 1998 and 2010, comprising approximately 8,300 trainees.

Note that (as Goldhaber et al. repeatedly stress) these are descriptive findings, not causal ones, because the analytic models can’t account for the non-random sorting of teachers to schools and teaching positions.

There are three key findings: First, teachers who student-taught in schools with low levels of teacher turnover are less likely to leave teaching.

Second, teachers appear to be more effective when the student demographics at their schools reflect those of the schools in which they student-taught. For example, students in high-poverty schools are predicted to score about 0.15 standard deviations higher if their teachers student-taught in schools with the same percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL).

Third, and of particular interest, teachers are more likely to have student-taught in more advantaged schools than their current schools. Sixty percent of interns land their first teaching gigs in schools with a higher percentage of FRPL students than their internship schools. This means that students in disadvantaged schools are less likely than those in advantaged schools to have a teacher whose internship “matched” their school setting. If “matching” is indeed beneficial, as the second finding suggests, then analysts have this advice: If “TEPs [teacher education programs] are committed to educating teachers who will be successful in disadvantaged schools, [they] need to be placing more student-teachers in these settings.”

Schools, take heed. And, researchers, given the dearth of empirical research on teacher preparation programs, including student-teaching experiences, let’s wade further into these waters.

SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber, John M. Krieg, and Roddy Theobald, "Does the Match Matter? Exploring Whether Student Teaching Experienc...," CALDER (January 2016).