Surprisingly, the debate over +/- grade systems seems to occur, largely, at the college and university level. Few middle and high schools seem to have taken on the issue, at least in any way that appears in the public literature. Other opinions suggest that it is the discriminating quality of plus/minus grading systems that make them useful. A…

College completion rates in the U.S. are stubbornly low despite the large and rising returns to a college degree. Efforts to increase student success in college have largely ignored a potentially key factor: the instruction that students receive in the sequence of courses that add up to a college education. Improving the quality of instruction may…

Fuzzy logic, which is based on fuzzy sets theory introduced by Zadeh in 1965, provides a rich and meaningful addition to standard logic. The applications which may be generated from or adapted to fuzzy logic are wide-ranging and provide the opportunity for modeling under conditions which are imprecisely defined. In this article we develop a fuzzy…

Act 82 of 2012 established new standards for Pennsylvania's teacher evaluation system, including the incorporation of student performance measures in ratings decisions. Since 2009, approximately 35 states have amended teacher evaluation systems, with student achievement playing an increasingly prominent role. This count includes neighboring…

States, districts, and schools all across the United States are busy developing or implementing teacher evaluation systems. One can trace this flurry of activity to a variety of reports and initiatives that highlight two failings of past efforts: (1) Teacher evaluation systems have not accurately measured teacher quality because they've failed to…

Grades often are determined by the unspoken values and beliefs of an autonomous teacher, but technology is making grading practices more transparent to parents, students, and educators. The ability to view the grade books of teachers who are teaching the same course in the same district is increasingly raising questions and challenges to what were…

Recently, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) completed a study to connect the scale of the North Carolina State End of Grade (EOG) Testing Program used for North Carolina's mathematics and reading assessments with NWEA's Rausch Interval Unit (RIT) scale. Information from the state assessments was used in a study to establish…

In 2010, HCM Strategists received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to engage academic researchers in identifying and discussing the best currently available ways to account for differences in college "inputs"--students, resources, and fixed characteristics--when evaluating postsecondary outcomes. The project, Context…

Having addressed variations of the question--How can a school's success be "measured"?--with mixed results across a collective five decades of service to boards, John Gulla and Olaf Jorgenson endeavored to develop a more helpful answer. To this end, they queried 200-plus leaders of California Association of Independent Schools…

The New York State Board of Regents has committed to the transformation of the preparation, support and evaluation of all teachers and school leaders in New York State, and the New York State Legislature has enacted historic legislation (Education Law §3012-c) that fundamentally changes the way teachers and principals are evaluated. Under the new…

The identification of children at-risk for reading problems can be costly and time-consuming. Previous research has indicated that teachers are relatively accurate in assessing children's overall reading ability. This study investigated the accuracy of kindergarten and first grade teacher rating scales in predicting children's reading…

States are grappling with a federal requirement that is forcing them to use a new, more uniform method of calculating high school graduation rates--a method that, in some states, is yielding rates that are 20 percentage points lower than those states have reported in the past. Under a 2008 update to federal education rules, the states were…

Recent developments in OER and MOOCs (Open Educational Resources and Massive Open Online Courses) have raised questions as to how learners engaging with these courses and components might be assessed or credentialed. This descriptive and exploratory paper examines PLAR (Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition) as a possible answer to these…

AIR is working with states and districts across the country to improve teacher evaluation and feedback. Our work is focused on designing systems of educator evaluation and compensation that incorporate multiple measures of performance and, in particular, measures of student growth. In this work, student learning objectives (SLOs) have emerged as a…

The literature on effective schools emphasizes teacher quality as a critical input for improving student outcomes. Teacher certification status, years of experience and possession of a graduate degree are three factors commonly taken into consideration when assessing teacher quality. With the advent of advanced measurement tools, however,…