Diverse stakeholders have an interest in understanding how teacher characteristics—their preparation and experience, knowledge, and mind-sets and habits—relate to students’ outcomes in mathematics. Past research has extensively explored this issue but often examined each characteristic in isolation. Drawing on data from roughly 300 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers, we attend to multiple teacher characteristics and find that experience, knowledge, effort invested in noninstructional activities, and participation in mathematics content/methods courses predict student outcomes. We also find imbalances in key teacher characteristics across student populations. We discuss the implications of these findings for hiring and training mathematics teachers.
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