Assessment of Teaching to Predict Gains in Student Achievement in Urban Schools

Lekwa, Adam J.
Reddy, Linda A.
Dudek, Christopher M.
Hua, Anh N.

Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

The current study was implemented as part of the School System Improvement Project, a collaboration between multiple universities and charter schools funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement as part of the Teacher Incentive Fund program (awarded to Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; S374A120060). The positions and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors.

Adam J. Lekwa, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 41 Gordon Road, Suite C, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8085 [email protected]

Received January 30, 2018

revised August 18, 2018

Accepted August 25, 2018

School Psychology 34(3):p 271-280, May 2019. | DOI: 10.1037/spq0000293

We examined the degree to which assessment of teachers’ instructional and behavior management practices, as measured by the Classroom Strategies Assessment System (CSAS; ), relates to gains in student achievement as measured by the Measures of Academic Progress (). Two-level hierarchical linear modeling was applied to achievement scores from 2,771 students in 130 kindergarten through 8^th-grade classrooms in 13 urban schools serving students in communities with high concentrations of poverty. Results suggest that teachers’ use of evidence-based instructional and behavior management strategies, as measured by the CSAS, were associated with reading and mathematics gains. In general, students in classrooms with higher quality use of evidence-based teaching strategies exhibited greater gains, whereas students in classrooms with lower quality use of effective strategies exhibited lesser gains. Implications of these findings for research and educational practice are presented.