What Makes Teachers Effective

I examined the relationship between teacher effectiveness as measured by the number of learn units students required to meet an objective and the number of competencies mastered within the categories of teacher repertoires composing the CABAS® rank. Twenty preschool teachers participated in the study. A statistical analysis was used to investigate the degree to which these variables negatively correlated with each other. The results showed that the more competencies teachers mastered, the fewer learn units students required to meet an objective. A second experiment was conducted as an experimental analysis of the correlations found in the descriptive analysis. An adapted alternating treatments design was used to analyze the relationship between the number of competencies teachers mastered and the number of learn units their student required to meet an objective. Four teachers and four teacher assistants participated in the study. The teachers and teacher assistants each taught two sight word objectives for a student with bidirectional naming and a student without bidirectional naming. The results did not show a functional relationship between the number of competencies mastered and a lower LUC (learn unit to criterion). Teachers with more competencies mastered did not present fewer learn units for their students to meet an objective when compared to teacher assistants who had fewer competencies mastered. Possible explanations for a lack of a functional relationship found in Experiment 2 are discussed.