Edu*Select: Developing a Commercial Platform to Deliver Teacher Selection Tools

ended

Teacher selection presents a significant international challenge: UNESCO predicts that countries will need to select and train almost 69 million teachers by 2030 (UNESCO 2016). However, current teacher selection methods are largely ineffective (Goldhaber et al., 2014; Klassen & Kim, 2019), resulting in the suboptimal quality of the teacher workforce. Improving the ways in which prospective teachers are selected benefits children’s educational outcomes and a country’s social and economic health (Chetty et al., 2014). Our ERC-funded research (2015-2020) represents the first large-scale project to systematically develop and test a suite of selection tools using models from organisational psychology and medical education. Our results suggest that using innovative tools that are built on sound theory and research (especially using a situational judgment test [SJT] methodology) can reliably and validly assess the difficult-to-measure non-cognitive attributes of prospective teachers in multiple contexts (e.g., Klassen & Kim, 2018; Klassen & Rushby, 2019; Klassen et al., 2017; Durksen & Klassen, 2018). The goal of Edu*Select is to explore various commercial platforms (e.g., spin-out company, other start-up, licensing arrangement) from which to leverage our teacher selection research into widespread international application. The short-term impact of the proposal will be to establish the viability of commercial platforms from which to improve the ways in which education organisations (initial teacher education [ITE] programs and potential employers) can gather and use data to make decisions about selecting prospective teachers. The longer-term impact is the improvement of the quality of the teacher workforce, leading to social and economic benefits through enhanced educational outcomes. The ERC PoC project Edu*Select will lead to the market introduction of the first research-led teacher selection tools for international use.