Lottery-based identification strategies offer potential for generating the next generation of evidence on U.S. early education programs. The authors' collaborative network of five research teams applying this design in early education settings and methods experts has identified six challenges that need to be carefully considered in this next…

Nationally, teachers have experienced major changes in how their performance is evaluated. Teacher satisfaction with the evaluation system likely influences whether they will use the evaluation data to make instructional improvements, yet we know little about teachers' perceptions of their evaluations. Using survey data from Chicago Public…

Given the rapid adoption of machine learning methods by education researchers, and the growing acknowledgment of their inherent risks, there is an urgent need for tailored methodological guidance on how to improve and evaluate the validity of inferences drawn from these methods. Drawing on an integrative literature review and extending a…

Several state policies link high-stakes consequences to teacher evaluations, which tend to be heavily weighted by observation scores. However, research has only recently investigated the validity of these scores in field settings. This study examines the sensitivity of teacher observation scores to the number of observations assigned by state…

Higher education in India was caught completely unawares by the COVID-19 pandemic and the necessitated closure of educational institutions. Despite almost a decade of experience with online and distance learning at some top-tier and private institutions, the vast majority were unprepared and looked for quick solutions for different components of…

We investigated how evaluation standards employed in performance tests affect the impact of performance goals (here focused on appearance) on academic cheating. Thereby, we assumed that appearance goals would lead to increased cheating only if students' performance was presumably evaluated based on results rather than on the strategies they…

This study evaluated the extent to which existing measures met standards for a continuous suite of general outcome measures (GOMs) assessing children's early literacy from preschool through early elementary school. The study assessed 316 children from age 3 years (2 years prekindergarten) through Grade 2, with 8 to 10 measures of language,…

Recent accounts suggest that accountability pressures have trickled down into the early elementary grades and that kindergarten today is characterized by a heightened focus on academic skills and a reduction in opportunities for play. This paper compares public school kindergarten classrooms between 1998 and 2010 using two large, nationally…