In 2010, after several years of strong opposition from teachers, the South Korean government announced a new teacher evaluation system--Evaluation of Teacher Professional Development--which would be required for all teachers. The new system seeks to foster teacher professional development and, consequently, improve the quality of education.…

A teacher establishes red flags--clear and unambiguous warning signals--that enable her to intervene before students fail. Any student who has less than an 80 percent class average or who receives less than 80 percent on a quiz immediately moves into an intervention cycle in which the teacher regularly "checks in" with the student. Interventions…

Recently, two of the authors (Amrein-Beardsley & Collins, 2012) studied the impact of Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), a value-added model used to judge Houston teachers' performance. They examined the cases of four teachers who were terminated in summer 2011, at least in part because of their subpar EVAAS scores. Talking to…

Contrary to what many people assume, writes Stewart, a high-quality teacher workforce is not the simple result of some traditional cultural respect for teachers that exists in some countries. Rather, it requires deliberate policy choices. In a tour of seven countries that traditionally score high on international tests of student performance…

Student affect--the attitudes, interests, and values that students exhibit and acquire in school--can play a profoundly important role in students' postschool lives, possibly an even more significant role than that played by students' cognitive achievements. If student affect is so crucial, then why don't teachers assess it? One deterrent is that…

If a person were to ask an educator to identify the two most important attributes of an education test, the response most certainly would be "validity and reliability." These two tightly wedded concepts have become icons in the field of education assessment. As far as validity is concerned, the term doesn't refer to the accuracy of a test. Rather,…

Professional assessment organizations almost universally endorse the use of multiple measures for making education decisions. In practice, however, the concept of multiple measures is defined and applied in many different ways, depending on how we answer two questions--What counts as a "measure"? and How are the multiple measures…

This article traces the evolution of kindergarten from its focus on children, to its focus on outcomes, to its current focus on literacy and math. The early childhood parts of kindergarten are losing ground to growing allocation of kindergarten time to academic content. A more ecological approach to kindergarten involves reincorporating play into…

Teachers and administrators at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego, California, wanted to create a grading system that reflected understanding while still encouraging students to practice. They developed course competencies, or performance assessments, that teachers use to measure what students know and can do with the concepts…

In 2008-09, Colegio Ingles had a watershed year in terms of teachers learning to enhance one another's skills. Beneath a deceptively congenial surface, teachers at this Mexican preK-9th grade school were avoiding professional confrontations and rarely observed one another's classes or shared teaching solutions and innovations. That same year, the…

What's the best estimate of student performance on the Common Core State Standards? ACT, an organization involved in developing the standards, wanted to know how well today's students are meeting them. To find out, it analyzed the test results of 256,765 11th graders who took selected forms of the ACT test in spring 2010. In its report, "A First…

Federal policy now focuses on teacher "effectiveness" rather than teacher "quality" as its central policy concern. Rather than measuring inputs, the new focus looks to measure the outcomes of a teacher's work--that is, the extent to which the educator has met crucial student needs, such as improved student achievement. As…

There is no doubt that in the past 10 years, school culture has become a testing culture. But all the "multiple measures" do not really lead one to achieve the three most often cited goals of testing: building proficiency in basic skills, closing achievement gaps, and fostering the top-notch knowledge and skills that students will need…

Despite repeated calls for educators to get more instructional mileage out of the assessment data they have at hand, two deterrents typically stand in the way of most educators' effective use of test data. First, there's a missing "realization", and second, there's a missing "skill". Educators who possess both this realization and this skill will…

The skills that students need for the 21st century are not really new, assert Rotherham and Willingham. Critical thinking, problem solving, information literacy, and global awareness have been important to human progress throughout history, at least among the elites in different societies. What is new is the extent to which individual and…