EFFEQ: The importance of teacher competence for student school performance

About the project

The project investigates relations between teacher competence and educational results, with focus on interactions with student socio-economic and migration backgrounds.

Reading and mathematics in grade 1 to 6 are focused, one aim being to investigate how access to qualified teachers with relevant education has varied over time. Other aims are to analyze how teachers with different qualifications are distributed across schools with different composition of students, and to investigate which causal effects of teacher qualifications on student achievement can be established.

The investigations will take into account changes in student numbers and in contextual and individual prerequisites. The empirical basis is provided by information in registers kept by Statistics Sweden: the Teacher and Student/School registers, registers of national tests in grades 3, 6 and 9 and marks in grades 6 and 9.

The work is organized into two sub-projects, and three researchers will be involved for a period of three years. Descriptive techniques as well as longitudinal approaches at the school level will be applied.

Overall, the study is expected to generate insights about essential conditions for effective and equitable teaching in Swedish and mathematics in primary school, and about distributions of teacher competence across schools with different student composition.

Research environment: Prerequsites Education Outcome (FUR)

Project members

Stefan Johansson, Senior Lecturer, Project Leader, University of Gothenburg

Åse Hansson, Senior Lecturer, University of Gothenburg 

Tarja Alatalo, Associate Professor, Dalarna University

Jan-Eric Gustafsson, Professor Emeritus, University of Gothenburg

Bo Nielsen, Database Supervisor, University of Gothenburg