Assessing complex teaching performance in the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has caused the Educational Testing Service to wrestle with fundamental scoring issues that are both conceptual and technical. This report reviews the challenges encountered, how they are being addressed, and what the NBPTS effort has learned…

The Inland Empire Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Program (IE-BTSA) is in its third year of funded development and implementation of assessment strategies designed to guide support of beginning teachers. The IE-BTSA program is grounded in a cognitive and developmental model of how beginning teachers move along the continuum from novice…

The 24 chapters of this collection discuss contemporary approaches to using student learning gains to evaluating teachers or schools. The four methods considered are: (1) the Oregon Teacher Work Sample Methodology (chapters 2 through 6); (2) the Dallas Value-Added Accountability System (Texas) (chapters 7 through 11); (3) the Tennessee Value-Added…

This book examines the debate around posttenure review and suggests a model for faculty development that combines posttenure review with faculty assessment and development. The book addresses issues such as: what is faculty development; types of posttenure faculty development programs; designing development strategies; and what are the…

Student, teacher, and program evaluation are the themes of this issue. Articles include a supervisor's perspective on program evaluation; evaluating agricultural mechanics instruction; evaluating supervised occupational experience programs; evaluation of the vocational agriculture teacher; teacher evaluation from a student's perspective; what and…

An evaluation of student teacher competency through the use of measure of learner cognitive attainment reveals that teacher expectations do not influence achievement. The amount of experience, degree of effectiveness as perceived by the university supervisor, and time provided for students to learn by student teachers do influence learner…

The Connecticut Teacher Assessment Center Project has, since 1986, been developing a semistructured interview in the area of mathematics to evaluate beginning teacher competence. The strategy for validation of the project's performance tests, Connecticut's reform initiatives, and implications of systematic validity for traditional psychometric…

This study explored variables differentiating more and less effective teachers (N=24) of mildly retarded and learning-disabled elementary students. Personal/educational variables proved insignificant. Effective teachers conducted activities in the classroom, made frequent use of teacher questioning, limited independent seatwork (especially silent…

Major factors beyond a teacher's control that can influence teacher effectiveness are identified as sources of invalidity related to the inference of teacher effectiveness from students' achievement gains. These factors include: (1) student characteristics; (2) school characteristics; (3) test validity; and (4) pretest-posttest design…

This article attempts to outline the issues and to describe the process of developing a metaevaluation framework for assessing the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the performance-assessment instruments being created by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The metaevaluation framework consists of a set of evaluation…

The research of the Biology component of the Teacher Assessment Project (BioTAP) of Stanford (California) University is described. BioTAP uses portfolio development as an important aspect of teacher assessment. Advantages and drawbacks of teacher portfolios are discussed, including issues of validity and reliability. (SLD)

In 1987, Oregon moved to an outcome-based approach to teacher preparation and licensure, insisting on evidence of learning gains by students taught as one of the accomplishments that teachers need to demonstrate. Oregon's program and its implications for teacher education and educational improvement are discussed. (SLD)

To help beginning teachers succeed, principals should identify individual teachers' strengths and weaknesses during the interviewing/hiring stage, balance neophytes' workloads, limit their extracurricular activities, establish expectations, select veteran mentors, offer informal formative assessment, be specific about classroom observations, and…

Formerly National Education Association president, Mary Futrell got NEA to support the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and helped shift NEA's focus to professional development and human-rights issues. She believes teachers must help state and district entities set academic and professional-development standards. (MLH)

This article reports on the introduction of performance-related pay (PRP) in schools in Wales. Specifically, it evaluates the attitudes of teachers to PRP by means of a large-scale questionnaire survey. The results suggest a strong antipathy to PRP for school teachers on the basis that it would be divisive and difficult to implement. In…