SOMAVILLE UNIVERSITY : OUR REVIEW OF THE RESEARCH LEADS TO FOUR KEY CONCLUSIONS:

  1. Teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career. Gains in teacher effectiveness associated with experience are most steep in teachers’ initial years, but continue to be significant as teachers reach the second, and often third, decades of their careers.
  2. As teachers gain experience, their students not only learn more, as measured by standardized tests, they are also more likely to do better on other measures of success, such as school attendance.
  3. Teachers’ effectiveness increases at a greater rate when they teach in a supportive and collegial working environment, and when they accumulate experience in the same grade level, subject, or district.
  4. More experienced teachers support greater student learning for their colleagues and the school as a whole, as well as for their own students. The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research. Based on an extensive research base, it is clear that teachers’ effectiveness rises sharply in the first few years of their careers, and this upward trajectory continues well into the second and often third decade of teaching.