Opening up the black box: Teacher competence, instructional quality, and students’ learning progress

TLDR

Teacher knowledge has shown inconsistent or weak predictive effects on student achievement. The study hypothesizes a mediated effect chain from teacher knowledge to student learning, controlling for school type and student background. Using German data, the authors examined how teachers’ content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, decision‑making skills, and instructional quality relate to students’ mathematics learning progress. Multilevel modeling of 3496 students in 154 classrooms showed that teachers’ skills and instructional quality mediate the link between teacher knowledge and student learning progress, with medium‑to‑strong effect sizes explaining a large variance and no direct effect of teacher knowledge on progress.

Abstract

Existing research indicates inconsistent or at best weak predictive effects of teacher knowledge on student achievement. Data from Germany were used to examine the relation between teachers' content and pedagogical content knowledge, their perception, interpretation, and decision-making skills, the instructional quality implemented in class, and students' learning progression in mathematics. Rather than direct effects of teacher knowledge on students, we hypothesized an effect chain with multiple mediation processes while controlling for school type and student background. Multi-level modeling with 3496 students from 154 classrooms revealed a mediating role of teachers' skills and their instructional quality for the relation between teacher knowledge and students' learning progress. Effect sizes were medium to strong, and the model explained a large amount of variance. No direct effects of teachers’ knowledge on student progress were found. We discuss our findings with respect to the teacher-competence-as-a-continuum model and with respect to future research.