In addition to certification exam performance, we asked teachers to report their scores on college entrance examinations. This information is not collected by the DOE, nor do we believe it is likely to be used by administrators in making hiring decisions. While several early studies failed to find a significant relationship between college admissions scores and principals’ evaluations of new teachers (e.g., Maguire (1966), Ducharme (1970)), a well cited study by Ladd and Ferguson (1996) did find a link between scores on the ACT exam and student achievement growth. We therefore asked teachers about their college entrance examination scores. While we asked specifically about both the SAT and the ACT, few teachers reported an ACT score and, of those that did, 90 percent also reported an SAT score. We therefore do not use the ACT in our analysis. Although nearly 80 percent of the respondents claimed to have taken the SAT, less than one in three reported their exact scores. Anticipating that some teachers might not remember their scores, we also allowed teachers to give their scores in 100 point ranges, which most did, and we assign these teachers the midpoint of the reported range (e.g., we assign a score of 550 for someone reporting a score between 500 and 600). Still, about 50 teachers (12 percent of respondents) reported that they took the SAT but could not remember their scores at all. One problem with interpreting the relation between successful teaching and college entrance exam scores is that performance on standardized achievement tests is determined by a host of different factors: access to educational resources in childhood, parental investment in education, personal motivation and willingness to study hard, raw intelligence, etc. In order to separate out at least one of these proximate causes, the survey includes a direct test of cognitive ability, Raven’s Progressive Matrices Standard Version, an intelligence test that requires no linguistic or mathematics skills.4 An illustrative item for this instrument (taken from Raven
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The test relies on the participant’s ability to recognize and decode patterns of symbols presented in a matrix. Each set of items becomes progressively more difficult, requiring greater cognitive capacity to encode and analyze.
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