An Investigation of the Relationship Between Teacher Factors and Academic Performance of High School Students

This study examined the relationship between teacher factors and student achievement, measured by high school grade point average while controlling for student and school-level factors. The study focused on teacher certification, teacher experience, full-time employment status, level of academic degree, and teacher absenteeism for the first semester of the school year. The student factors that were included are gender, race, socioeconomic status, the number of students enrolled in Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate courses the students took during their high school careers. The school-level factor included in the study was the percentage of students who receive free and reduced lunches. This research method was a nonexperimental, relational, explanatory design with quantitative methods. This study used the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, a survey that was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics (Lauff & Ingels, 2014). The analysis included a multinomial logistic regression and variance inflation factors test. The sample size was 6,861 students from 750 schools within the United States. Students whose teachers possess certain characteristics were more likely to be academically successful, measured by HSGPA. Specifically, these characteristics include the total number of years teaching for K–12 mathematics, the total years teaching for K–12 English, and whether the teachers held full-time math-teacher status and were certified mathematics teachers were determined to be statistically significant. The empirical evidence outlined in this study, as well as the recommendations provided in this dissertation, can assist policymakers and administrators in obtaining the information needed to address minimum teaching requirements and their hiring practices to increase academic achievement.