An important challenge in evaluating the quality of teaching is to arrive at valid distinctions between teachers, particularly in the middle of the performance distribution. This study addressed this issue for the Chilean national teacher evaluation system. Mathematics teachers (N = 51) from the 2 middle adjacent performance categories, and their…

This paper investigates the validity of a national, standards-based teacher evaluation programme by examining the relationship between teachers' evaluation results and their students' learning progress. We used census achievement data that assessed the same cohort of students at the end of 8th and 10th grade. We applied multilevel modelling and…

Teacher practice is normally assessed by observers who watch classes or videos of classes. Here, we analyse an alternative strategy that uses text transcripts and a support vector machine classifier. For each one of the 710 videos of mathematics classes from the 2005 Chilean National Teacher Assessment Programme, a single 4-minute slice was…