Searching for effective teachers: A statistical analysis of the Ventures for Excellence Teacher Interview questionnaire

The debate about teacher effectiveness has tremendous implications, both politically and in terms of student achievement. Therefore decisions about hiring teachers must be made with a clear understanding about the attributes of effective teachers and with the help of a hiring instrument that is proven to be valid and reliable in ferreting out those attributes. This study was designed to investigate the attributes of quality teachers and to determine whether a commercially marketed hiring instrument, the Ventures for Excellence Teacher Interview Form B-22 Questionnaire (a.k.a. Ventures 22), is an effective hiring instrument.; A review of the research on the attributes of effective teachers revealed considerable disagreement among researchers about the importance of the various characteristics studied. The research review investigated teacher experience, degrees and coursework, content knowledge, certification and licensure, and pedagogical training. A confirmatory principal components analysis of the Ventures 22 instrument was performed, based on 315 teacher interviews conducted between 2001 and 2004 in a suburban Washington state school district. After assessing the data for its suitability for this data reduction technique, a three component solution was extracted, accounting for 30.27% of the variance in the data. Oblique rotation was used to aid in the interpretability of the components, revealing a strong simple structure with moderate loadings between .663 and - 461 and a number of problematic questions. Three items did not load on any component and one item was cross-loaded on two components. The components were named interpersonal sensitivity, engagement beliefs and strategies, and flexible thinking. These three components were significantly different from the three structure themes described by the instrument's creator, Dr. Vic Cottrell (2004).; The overall internal reliability of the instrument was estimated to be .757, using a Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Reliability of two of the three sub-scales was also confirmed. Construct validity of the instrument was not confirmed. Moreover, a review of the research indicated that more study is warranted about the importance of a teacher's educational values in predicting effectiveness in the classroom environment.; A split-file descriptive statistical analysis confirmed that the scores of teacher candidates who were hired using this instrument were higher than those who were not hired. The mean score for those hired was 13.99 while the mean score for those not hired was 10.34. Therefore, the instrument was useful in discriminating among teacher candidates. However, the data in this study revealed that six of the twenty two questions did not discriminate among candidates. The study includes a discussion of the implications of these data.