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…

High-quality measures of instructional practice are essential for research and evaluation of innovative instructional policies and programs. However, existing measures have generally proven inadequate because of cost and validity issues. This paper addresses two potential drawbacks of survey self-report measures: variation in teachers'…

New systems that seek to evaluate teachers with regard to their classroom quality often rely on observation instruments that capture general instructional pedagogies. However, decades of research suggest that content-specific dimensions of instruction also are important to differentiate teachers and improve student outcomes. We explore the degree…

This research analyzes the impact of the Adjusted Voucher Law´s school rankings on low-performing schools in Santiago, Chile, and provides evidence on the effects of the pressures of accountability systems on teacher policies and practices. The empirical strategy is based on the fact that schools are ranked according to their position on a set of…

Education agencies are evaluating teachers using student achievement data. However, very little is known about the comparability of test-based or "value-added" metrics across districts and the extent to which they capture variability in classroom practices. Drawing on data from four urban districts, we found that teachers were…

Like many states throughout the nation, Pennsylvania is in the midst of major reforms to its teacher evaluation system. Under the new system, the state will base annual evaluations on several measures, including supervisor observations using the Framework for Teaching (FFT) and, for many teachers, their contributions to student achievement growth…

This article describes the development and initial implementation of the Comprehension and Learning from Text Survey (CoLTS), an instrument designed to assess teachers' specialized knowledge for comprehension instruction in the context of discussion. CoLTS is a paper-and-pencil test that engages teachers in analyzing a text to identify the most…

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…

This study explored the relationships among the components of the Arizona Department of Education's new teacher evaluation model, with a particular focus on the extent to which ratings from the state model's teacher observation instrument differentiated higher and lower performance. The study used teacher-level evaluation data collected by the…

A study was conducted to examine the implementation of reciprocal teaching with fourth- and fifth-grade students as they read their social studies and science textbooks. A distinctive feature of the study was that reciprocal teaching procedures were used in a whole-class, rather than a small-group instructional setting. Three teachers and 67…