Two-year public colleges educate more than 50% of all U.S. undergraduates, yet graduation rates (29%) fall far below their 4-year counterparts (63%). It is critical for students of 2-year public institutions that their faculty have the appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to effectively guide students toward graduation. This study…

The Adult Mentoring Assessment for Extension Professionals will help mentors develop an accurate profile of their mentoring style with adult learners and identify areas of proficiency and deficiency based on six constructs--relationship, information, facilitation, confrontation, modeling, and vision. This article reports on the reliability of this…

New teacher evaluation systems have emerged as the cornerstone of the recent movement to improve public school teaching. Fueled by incentives from the federal government, state and local policymakers have sought to replace the often-cursory evaluation models of the past with more comprehensive ones. In contrast to past evaluations, which often…

In this article, we explain how overly prescriptive, rigid state statutory and regulatory policy frameworks regarding teacher evaluation, tenure and employment decisions outstrip the statistical reliability and validity of proposed measures of teaching effectiveness. We begin with a discussion of the emergence of highly prescriptive state…

Social skills are an important part of development, and deficits in this area have long-term impacts on a child. As a result, clinicians should include a measure of social skills as part of a comprehensive assessment. There are a few well-researched measures of social skills that are currently used, including the Matson Evaluation of Social Skills…

This report summarizes research findings and implementation practices for teacher and principal value-added models (VAMs), as a first step in the Team Pennsylvania Foundation's (Team PA) pilot project to inform the development of a full, statewide model evaluation system. We have selected 21 studies that represent key issues and findings in the…