Saturday, June 14, 2008

How do we measure teaching success?

Now that I've wrapped up my third year of teaching, I'm once again thinking about my success as a teacher and my students' success in my classes. How should we measure success? Passing the class? Learning something, learning enough? Using what we've learned? Attending class? With my own children, my main criterion for success in their education is that it continues to keep them enthusiastic about learning. I've seen that in some of my students but I haven't measured it (yet). Since I like numbers and I'm a math teacher, I'm going to take a look at some of the numbers I have.

Altogether for the three classes I taught this past semester, there were 64 students by the end of the year. The passing rate was about 69%. About 17% of the students earned an A or B. Another measure is the pre and post test results. This is kind of tricky because not all the students took both tests. Of those who did, about 55% increased their score (on the post test) by 10 points or more, and 38% increased by 20 points or more.

I'm not feeling very successful. I need to work on inspiring my students more -- or inspiring more of my students : ) Some students were motivated and seemed to enjoy the class. But there are no numbers for that (yet).