This publication summarizes the key discussion from experts in the field of measuring student growth during a convening held February 2015. Experts heard about two emerging approaches to measuring growth: Portfolios of student work samples and unit value-added models that provide teachers with timely and actionable feedback that they can use to…

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is working to respond to increased interest in the use of growth models for school accountability. Growth models are based on tracking change in individual student achievement scores over multiple years. While growth models have been used for decades in academic research and program evaluation, a…

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Education awarded eight Striving Readers grants to projects around the country. The goal of Striving Readers is to improve literacy skills and achievement for struggling readers in middle and high school and to increase the research base using randomized clinical research to address improvement in adolescent…

The study reported here focused on assessing teacher quality in online environments. The purpose of the study was to explore the feasibility of using the same method Tennessee currently uses to gauge teaching quality of traditionally-delivered courses to determine teaching quality in the online environment. Research questions were: (1) Is there a…

New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit organization committed to training school principals, heads the Effective Practices Incentive Community (EPIC), an initiative that offers financial awards to effective educators. New Leaders and its partner organizations have received from the U.S. Department of Education tens of millions of dollars in…

This report summarizes research findings and implementation practices for teacher and principal value-added models (VAMs), as a first step in the Team Pennsylvania Foundation's (Team PA) pilot project to inform the development of a full, statewide model evaluation system. We have selected 21 studies that represent key issues and findings in the…

The objective of the project was to pilot test the Model to Evaluate Inservice Personnel Development. The pilot test was designed to determine: (1) whether the model could evaluate the personnel development programs in the two States where the model was pilot tested, (2) applicability of the model in other States, and (3) the potential of the…

Recently, a model was developed for use in gathering data and making evaluations in a systematic manner. The purpose of this study was to adapt the model for evaluation of the graduates of the teacher preparation program of Tennessee Technological University. A sample of 59 graduates of the teacher preparation program of the university, who were…

This article promotes the use of contextual constructionism in evaluation research. The call for truth in sentencing in Tennessee (and across the country) is used to illustrate the conflict among stakeholders that arises from program evaluation and to show how their multiple realities make a contextual constructionist approach pertinent. (SLD)

The impact which program evaluation and subsequent short-term in-service education efforts had upon the curricular programs of two distinctly different school settings was assessed. In addition, the appropriateness of the Kunkel-McElhinney model of curriculum evaluation, as perceived by professional school personnel, was examined and assessed. The…

This State model for teacher evaluation meets the requirements of Tennessee's Comprehensive Education Reform Act of 1984 (CERA). Special guidelines, approved by the State Board of Education for the beginning year of CERA (1984-85), are incorporated into the State model for local evaluation. Groups who must be evaluated during the 1984-85 school…