Classroom assessment and instructional leadership. Development and evaluation of a feedback intervention for school principals

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Felicitas Thiel
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283241518

The aim of this project is to develop and evaluate a feedback intervention that improves teaching quality. This intervention is designed to provide a staff development instrument to principals. Principals would base their feedback to teachers on a newly developed standardized classroom assessment, which utilizes an observation sheet. The assessment comprises three basic dimensions of teaching quality (instruction, motivation, classroom management), which are operationalized with a great degree of discrimination. Additionally, each dimension differentiates between four levels of teaching standards (standard setting). These levels form the basis for both feedback from principals to teachers as well as further goal setting between principals and teachers to improve teaching quality. The work program encompasses the development of the observation sheet, the development of rater trainings for school principals and a feedback procedure that includes goal setting processes. In a pilot study, the observation sheet is developed and validated. In the main study, a field experiment is conducted to measure the effect of a feedback intervention on the development of teaching quality. For this purpose, an experimental design is realized. The intervention consists of feedback to teachers by principals who took part in the training on classroom assessment, feedback and goal setting. In the control group, teachers do not receive any feedback from their principals on teaching quality during the study period. The aim of the experiment is to measure the average effectiveness of the intervention to increase teaching quality (from the students perspective) compared to a control group. Theoretical foundations of the study are feedback-intervention research and goal-setting theory, which have not been applied to school leadership research so far. Therefore, current education research lacks findings on the effectiveness of feedback from school leaders to improve teaching quality. For that reason, school leadership research would benefit conceptually and empirically from this study. Particularly, the poorly operationalized concept of instructional leadership would consolidate on a stronger theoretical basis. Another benefit is the validation of an observation sheet that is based on a functional analysis of teaching standards, which can also be used for other development and research purposes. Of practical value is the development and evaluation of a feedback intervention that could be used by school principals as part of the mandatory teacher appraisal in most German states.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Privatdozent Dr. Holger Gärtner