Teaching is a multifaceted and complex process. Teachers have to handle multiple responsibilities, functions, goals simultaneously and flexibly. It is also a constantly evolving process. An instructor needs to reflect and make adjustments, needing quite a lot of adapting. For teaching to be effective, there is a need to keep refining the process by self-reflection and feedback received. But teaching doesn’t solely depend on this facet; the other side of the coin is the student.
Many aspects influence a student’s ability to be taught and how much he can learn as well. Students’ socio-cultural background, socio-economic realities, prior knowledge-know how, emotional wellbeing, physical health, perseverance-grit-resilience, resource availability, prior experiences, etc., can be gauged by tests and exams. Still, a multitude of factors affects student performance.
Student success is the primary goal of teaching, but test scores cannot purely define success. So how do you measure students’ success? What factors determine how the success of students is calculated? And even if you come up with multiple formulas to calculate success, how much can you be sure of it. This assessment of measuring effective teaching becomes way more daunting and complicated once you start dissecting it.
So when it is said that measuring teaching success is complicated, it is not a remark on testable hypothesis, but what assessment truly matters! So first, there has to be a commonly accepted measurement of students’ success, then we can further decide what should be the effective assessment methodology. But you cannot do a quantitative study with isolated variables in this case because that is not how it works in real life, nor will it yield any valid outcome.
Test scores and grades are one thing, but you have to go way beyond that when measuring success as an educator and teacher. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough pedagogical research that anyone can definitively answer this dilemmatic question as to how to measure teaching success.
However, you can infer that it’s a complicated process filled with various attributes that are not the same for every student. So the outcome per student is different, and it cannot be generalized!
