TY - JOUR AU - Rockoff,Jonah E. AU - Jacob,Brian A. AU - Kane,Thomas J. AU - Staiger,Douglas O. TI - Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14485 PY - 2008 Y2 - November 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14485 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14485.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Jonah E. Rockoff Columbia University Graduate School of Business 3022 Broadway #603 New York, NY 10027-6903 Tel: 212/854-9799 Fax: 212/316-9219 E-Mail: jonah.rockoff@columbia.edu Brian Jacob Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy University of Michigan 735 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Tel: 734-615-6994 Fax: NA E-Mail: bajacob@umich.edu Thomas J. Kane Harvard Graduate School of Education Center for Education Policy Research 50 Church St., 4th Floor Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-4359 E-Mail: kaneto@gse.harvard.edu Douglas O. Staiger Dartmouth College Department of Economics HB6106, 301 Rockefeller Hall Hanover, NH 03755-3514 Tel: 603/646-2979 Fax: 603/646-2122 E-Mail: douglas.staiger@dartmouth.edu AB - Research on the relationship between teachers' characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. However, most research has examined a relatively small set of characteristics that are collected by school administrators in order to satisfy legal requirements and set salaries. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument. Individually, we find that only a few of these predictors have statistically significant relationships with student and teacher outcomes. However, when all of these variables are combined into two primary factors summarizing cognitive and non-cognitive teacher skills, we find that both factors have a modest and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores. These results suggest that, while there may be no single factor that can predict success in teaching, using a broad set of measures can help schools improve the quality of their teachers. ER -