Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Employers measure (evaluate) the job performance of their employees with the goal of improving that performance. In typical practice, job performance measures are combined with incentives. Yet, the process of evaluation might improve performance even without attaching (explicit) incentives. This paper reports improvements in teacher job performance, as measured by teacher contributions to student test scores, resulting from a program of (zero-) low-stakes peer evaluation. Teachers working at the same school observed and scored each other’s teaching using a detailed rubric. Students in randomly-assigned treatment schools scored 0.07σ higher on high-stakes GCSE math and English exams (0.09σ lower-bound TOT). Within each treatment school, teachers were further randomly assigned to roles: observer and observee. Teachers in both roles improved, perhaps slightly more for observers. The typical treatment school completed 2-3 observations per observee teacher. Variation in observations was generated partly by randomly assigning a low and high (2*low) dose of suggested number of observations. Benefits were quite similar across dose conditions.