The author reports on the debate about "value added" measures of teaching which may be the most divisive topic in teacher-quality policy today. It has generated sharp-tongued exchanges in public forums, in news stories, and on editorial pages. And it has produced enough policy briefs to fell whole forests. But for most of the nation's teachers,…

The United States education system depends on legislation and funding at the federal, state and local levels. Public understanding of assessment therefore is important to educational reform in the USA. Educational reformers often invoke assessment information as a reason for reform, typically by citing unacceptable achievement on some measure or…

New high-frequency, automated data collection and analysis algorithms could offer new insights into complex learning processes, especially for tasks in which students have opportunities to generate unique open-ended artifacts such as computer programs. These approaches should be particularly useful because the need for scalable project-based and…

Controversy surrounds the issue of single-gender education, with advocates debating that the initiative decreases discrimination, improves educational experiences for males and females, and provides parents more choice. Opponents argue that single-gender education is a form of segregation and negates the gains that women have achieved in the area…

Early childhood professionals take on numerous roles: They inspire; they nurture; they foster creativity in the young and impressionable minds of tomorrow. And while each one of these roles holds equal importance to the other, none is more important than the role of the observer. But when a teacher has 15, 20, or more children in his/her class, it…

Raimes (1983) has identified nine components necessary to produce a piece of writing that is clear, fluent and effective. These are also the aspects that are considered when assessing writing. The common practice is to have raters score the essays and they are provided with a rating scale for this purpose. A training and practice session is also…

We examined the persistence of teacher effects from grade to grade on lower-performing students using data from Project STAR. Teacher effects were computed as residual classroom achievement within schools. Teacher effects in one grade predicted achievement in following grades using quantile regression. Results consistently indicated that all…

For many years, England has been the epitome of high-stakes accountability, often playing leapfrog with the USA. It represents an extreme of centralized surveillance, with schools organized as a quasi-market and supervised through a punitive combination of external inspection, the use of test data to name and shame schools, and ultimately closure…

Declining college admission test scores during the 1970s raised concerns that America's primary schools were inadequately preparing students for college or the workforce. Rock's (1985) analysis of SAT scores indicated that seniors in 1980 scoring at the 50th percentile for vocabulary would have placed at the 41st percentile in 1972. Mathematics…

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether American schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. Despite high unemployment rates, firms are experiencing shortages of educated workers, outsourcing professional-level work to workers abroad, and competing for the…

Recently, some critics and policymakers have started to question the value of a college education given the increasing costs of attending and the commensurate high debt levels of college graduates. Past and present studies also demonstrate that the average value masks important variation by degree level and field of study. This paper focuses on…

The diagonal line in Arkansas separating academic and economic strivers from those less likely to make the grade--and then land a decent job--runs roughly from Texarkana in the southwest to Blytheville in northeast. "The wealthiest people live above that line," said Dr. James Jennings, a history professor and education department…

This study extends previous research on teachers' self-efficacy by exploring reciprocal effects of teachers' self-efficacy and instructional quality in a longitudinal panel study. The study design combined a self-report measure of teacher self-efficacy with teacher and student ratings of instructional quality (assessing cognitive activation,…

Basing the compensation of accounting professors on merit pay in order to encourage better teaching, research and service is controversial. This study uses data from a survey of the 852 accounting programs in the United States to empirically examine the influence of merit-based salary plans. Findings indicate a strong positive association between…

Using computers to evaluate teachers based on student test scores is more difficult than it seems. Value-added modeling is a genuinely serious attempt to grapple with the difficulties. Value-added modeling carries the promise of measuring teacher quality automatically and objectively, and improving school systems at minimal cost. The essence of…