Professor Tyler's recent research focuses on teacher evaluation and measures of teacher effectiveness, examinations of how teachers use data to inform and improve their practice, and in general, impact evaluation in education. Past research has examined dropout issues, the economic returns to the GED credential, the returns to skills for low educated individuals, and the impact of correctional education on post-release labor market outcomes of criminal justice offenders.
Areas of Specialization: Economics of Education, Impact Evaluation Research, Quantitative Methods
Description of Research and Teaching Interests: Current research is primarily in two areas: teacher evaluation and data use by teachers. Recent work from the first area examines the extent to which various classroom practices result in student test score growth and the extent to which going through a rigorous classroom-observation evaluation system impacts teacher effectiveness. Work in the second area has used objective data in the form of automatically generated web logs to examine how much and in what ways teachers view student performance data when it is presented to them in a web-based application. This work also examines the extent to which the use of web-based student data is related to student test score growth.
Recent awards:
Two year (2011-2013), $175,000 William T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellowship award for a study of "Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating the Next Generation of Teacher Evaluation Systems."
Two year (2011-2013), $417,000 Spencer Foundation grant for a "Study of ARIS Usage and Lessons from the ARIS-Local Rollout."
Tyler, John H. 2012. "If You Build It Will They Come? Teachers' Online Use of Student Performance Data." Education Finance and Policy (accepted and forthcoming).
Taylor, Eric S. and John H. Tyler. 2012. "The Effect of Evaluation on Teacher Performance." American Economic Review (accepted and forthcoming, authors listed alphabetically.).
Kane, Thomas J., Eric S. Taylor, John H. Tyler, and Amy L. Wooten. (2011) "Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness." Education Next 11(3): Summer. (Authors listed alphabetically).
Kane, Thomas J., Eric S. Taylor, John H. Tyler, and Amy L. Wooten. 2011. "Identifying Effective Classroom Practice Using Student Achievement Data." Journal of Human Resources 46(3):587-613 (Authors listed alphabetically).
Tyler, John and Magnus Lofstrom. 2010. "Is the GED an Effective Route to Postsecondary Education for School Dropouts?" Economics of Education Review 29:813-825.
Tyler, John H., Eric S. Taylor, Thomas J. Kane, and Amy L. Wooten. 2010. "Using Student Performance Data to Identify Effective Teachers and Teaching Practices." American Economic Review 100:256-260.
Tyler, John H. and Magnus Lofstrom. 2009. "Finishing High School: Alternative Pathways and Dropout Recovery." Pp. 77-103 in America's High Schools, vol. 19, The Future of Children, edited by C. Rouse and J. Kemple. Princeton, NJ: Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and The Brookings Institution.
