John Dewey is known as the father of American experiential education. His views on building understanding in children through experiences in a correlated curriculum continue to influence educational practice to this day. His writings and experiments with experiential education also influenced music and arts education, most recently through the…

Working toward promotion and tenure (P&T) is a large part of working as a faculty member at an institution of higher education. Through this process one provides evidence of contribution to the overall scholarly body of knowledge. However, this is affected by changes to cultural norms, administrative processes, and institutional expectations.…

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. In this paper, we study how providing improved information to principals about teacher effectiveness and encouraging them to use the…

The purpose of this study was to identify how one district attempted to meet the need for greater accountability in the teacher evaluation process as mandated by law and to describe strategies that were employed by the district to ensure the integration of student achievement data. This research highlighted how a teacher evaluation instrument…

Online student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are commonly used by students to provide anonymous feedback concerning their overall experience with the course content and their instructors. However, concerns have been raised that the gender of the instructor and student may interact causing more effective instructors to receive lower ratings. At a…

This study reports on the development and field study of K-TEEM, a web-based assessment instrument designed to measure mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) at the early elementary level. The development process involved alignment with early elementary curriculum standards, expert review of items and scoring criteria, cognitive interviews with…

The purpose of this study was to determine if a teacher's Professional Growth and Effectiveness System (PGES) rating is an effective indicator for student achievement. Participants in the study were 9th through 12th grade English 10, Biology, U.S. History and Algebra 2 teachers and students enrolled in their courses. The teacher participants'…

Novice teachers' professional contexts may have important implications for their effectiveness, development, and retention. However, due to data limitations, descriptions of these contexts are often unidimensional or vague. Using 10 years of administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we describe patterns of new teacher…

Concerned about the expense of teacher turnover, its disruption to schools and students, and its potential effect on students' access to effective teachers, the School District of Philadelphia partnered with the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic to better understand students' access to effective teachers and the factors related to…

Concerned about the expense of teacher turnover, its disruption to schools and students, and its potential effect on students' access to effective teachers, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) partnered with the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic to better understand students' access to effective teachers and the factors related to…

Responding to an Illinois law that took effect in 2010, the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) created and implemented the REACH (Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students) educator evaluation and support system. REACH was piloted in 2012-13. It is still being implemented as of the 2019-20 school year…

Presently, across the nation, immigration headlines grip the public's attention with negative messages, under the assumption that immigrants are stereotyped as either individuals with criminal intent or people who are unpatriotic to the United States. Under this thought, politicians scramble to meet the needs of their state by protecting their…

The purpose of this statement is to inform those using or considering the use of value-added models (VAM) about their scientific and technical limitations in the evaluation of educators and programs that prepare teachers. The statement briefly reviews the background and current context of using VAM for evaluations, enumerates specific psychometric…

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based value-added measures (VAMs) of performance as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A key concern is the extent to…

The five thoughtful papers included in this issue of "Educational Researcher" ("ER") raise new questions about the use of value-added methods (VAMs) to estimate teachers' contributions to students' learning as part of personnel evaluation. The papers address both technical and implementation concerns, considering potential…