Teachers Closing Gaps: The Impact of Teaching Quality on Learning Outcomes

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The general objective of this TC is to identify which characteristics of teachers allow young, disadvantaged children, who enter school with profound deficits in cognitive development, to close their skills gaps. The specific objective of this TC is to continue a project, ¿Closing Gaps¿, which evaluates different dimensions of teacher quality. Among other aspects, the project evaluates the impact of a central dimension of teacher quality ¿ the interactions between teachers and students. For this purpose, it uses the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), an instrument that evaluates teachers on three dimensions: socio-emotional support; classroom management; and instructional support. In the US, better performance on the CLASS has been associated with higher learning of students (Mashburn et al. 2010; Pianta and Hamre 2009; Pianta 2011).