A Systematic Review of Goal Setting and Performance Feedback to Improve Teacher Practice

Performance feedback has been identified as an evidence-based practice to improve teacher implementation fidelity. The efficacy of performance feedback might be enhanced with ancillary strategies such as goal setting. In this paper, we systematically reviewed 22 experimental studies in which a combination of goal setting and performance feedback was used to improve teacher implementation of practices. We summarized effects and explored which aspects of goal setting and performance feedback were associated with improved performance. Overall, we found the combination of goal setting and performance feedback was highly effective. We found that the features associated with consistent positive effects included visual presentation of data, verbal feedback, teacher-created goals, measurement of progress toward goals, and discussion of goals during feedback. We discuss why these particular features might be efficacious, and how administrators and teacher trainers can integrate them into their efforts to support teachers to improve their practice.