Predicting Teacher Effectiveness Based on Various Preservice Factors: Implications for Higher Education and the Evaluation of Teacher Preparation

The purpose of this study was to investigate a set of teacher-level factors that educator preparation providers (EPPs) may be examining to anticipate how effective teachers might be in the classroom. An ordinal logistic regression was performed to determine impact on teacher effectiveness, given five predictor variables: level (undergraduate vs. graduate), age, GPA, ACT, and Praxis II scores. The findings demonstrated that only level made a significant individual contribution to prediction, suggesting that undergraduate students were less likely to have higher teacher effectiveness scores than graduate students. The major implication for states may be to evaluate EPPs and their abilities to impact the quality of preservice teacher candidates separately based on whether they serve primarily undergraduate or graduate student populations