Engineering design is being increasingly included in elementary education, typically to provide students with opportunities to apply science and mathematics concepts while developing their engineering practices. An important question is how to prepare teachers who can help students develop more informed engineering practices during classroom…

Student assessment nonparticipation (or opt out) has increased substantially in K-12 schools in states across the country. This increase in opt out has the potential to impact achievement and growth (or value-added) measures used for educator and institutional accountability. In this simulation study, we investigated the extent to which…

Value-added assessment methods have been criticized by researchers and policy makers for a number of reasons. One issue includes the sensitivity of model results across different outcome measures. This study examined the utility of incorporating multivariate latent variable approaches within a traditional value-added framework. We evaluated the…

The increased emphasis on using student growth measures in teacher evaluation has raised questions about how to treat test scores from students with disabilities. This study explores the consequences of three common approaches for treating scores from students with disabilities in statistical approaches to estimating teacher effectiveness: (1)…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the TVAAS growth score given by the Tennessee Department of Education and the overall Tennessee Educator Assessment Model (TEAM) observation rating for teachers in grades 3 through 8. The participating county public school system for this study is located in Northeast Tennessee.…

The purpose of this report is to explore the content-related validity evidence supporting the English language arts (ELA) components of the "ETS"® National Observational Teaching Exam (NOTE) assessment series, a kindergarten through 6th-grade teacher licensure assessment. To establish the content knowledge required for the effective…

The purpose of this report is to explore the content-related validity evidence supporting the mathematics components of the "ETS"® National Observational Teaching Exam (NOTE) assessment series, a kindergarten through 6th grade teacher licensure assessment. To establish the content knowledge required for the effective teaching of…

The purpose of the research is to evaluate pre-­service preschool teachers' knowledge about environment by analyzing their drawings about it. 70 first grade, 99 second grade, 56 third grade and 44 fourth grade, with a total of 269 students have been evaluated in this research. This qualitative research was made with social structuralism vision.…

Stories about the importance of teacher effectiveness for student achievement are currently ubiquitous in the media (Gladwell 2008; Kristoff 2009; Felch et al 2010). Teacher quality is also the focus of significant national efforts and investments. A growing body of quantitative research supports the focus on teacher and teacher effectiveness.…

This study is part of the core research agenda of the five-year, Goal 3 grant funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U. S. Department of Education "Improving the Teaching and Learning of English Language Learners: The Instructional Conversation Model." In video review of teaching, bias in evaluation or rating is evident in many…

Early childhood professional organizations support teachers as the best assessors of students' academic, social, emotional, and physical development. This study investigates the predictive nature of teacher ratings of first-grade students' performance on a standards-based curriculum-embedded performance assessment within the context of a state…

If teacher value-added estimates (VAEs) are to be used as indicators of individual teacher performance in teacher evaluation and accountability systems, it is important to understand how much VAEs are affected by the data and model specifications used to estimate them. In this study we explored the effects of three conditions on the stability of…

Teams of educators conducted lesson study independently, supported by a resource kit that included mathematical tasks, curriculum materials, lesson videos and plans, and research articles, as well as protocols to support lesson study. The mathematical resources focused on linear measurement interpretation of fractions. This report examines the…

Teacher judgments about students' academic abilities are important for instructional decision making and potential special education entitlement decisions. However, the small number of studies evaluating teachers' judgments are limited methodologically (e.g., sample size, procedural sophistication) and have yet to answer important questions…

Economic theory commonly models unobserved worker quality as a given parameter that is fixed over time, but empirical evidence supporting this assumption is sparse. In this paper we report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given that new workforce policies implicitly…