The Scylla and Charybdis in this discussion of teacher evaluation are standardized achievement test data on the one hand, and classroom observational systems on the other. These are the two most common methods used to judge teachers' competency. Both have serious flaws: the former primarily with validity, the latter primarily with reliability. At…

A cross-case analysis of four National Science Foundation (NSF) case studies identified both unique details and common themes related to promoting the use and influence of multisite evaluations. The analysis provided evidence of diverse evaluation use by stakeholders and suggested that people taking part in the multisite evaluations perceived…

There are many ways to use student test scores to evaluate schools. This paper defines and examines different estimators, including regression-based value-added indicators, average gains, and successive cohort differences in achievement levels. Given that regression-based indicators are theoretically preferred but not always feasible, we consider…

Recently, educational researchers and practitioners have turned to value-added models to evaluate teacher performance. Although value-added estimates depend on the assessment used to measure student achievement, the importance of outcome selection has received scant attention in the literature. Using data from a large, urban school district, I…

The Treatment Integrity Planning Protocol (TIPP) provides a structured process for collaboratively creating a treatment integrity assessment within a consultation framework. The authors evaluated the effect of the TIPP on the implementation of an intervention designed to improve the consistency of students' mathematics performance. Treatment…

In this article, we introduce a person-fit statistic called the hierarchy consistency index (HCI) to help detect misfitting item response vectors for tests developed and analyzed based on a cognitive model. The HCI ranges from -1.0 to 1.0, with values close to -1.0 indicating that students respond unexpectedly or differently from the responses…

Extensive education research on the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results. First, teacher quality varies substantially as measured by the value added to student achievement or future academic attainment or earnings. Second, variables often used to determine entry into the profession and…

Conditions necessary and sufficient for the determination of LISREL model solutions are identified. The reasons for indeterminacy of LISREL solutions are discussed, and an index of determinacy is presented and related to the covariance matrix of latent variables. (SLD)

Large scale testing in English affects second-language students not only greatly but also differently than first-language learners. The research literature reports that confounding factors in such large-scale testing such as varying test formats may differentially affect the performance of students from diverse backgrounds. An investigation of…

Reviews current educational software evaluation methods, highlights problems, and describes the York Educational Software Evaluation Scales (YESES), an alternative criterion based model. Panel evaluation used by YESES is explained and YESES results are compared with evaluations from the Educational Products Information Exchange (EPIE) to indicate…

Mounting pressure in the policy arena to improve teacher productivity either by improving signals that predict teacher performance or through creating incentive contracts based on performance--has spurred two related questions: Are there important determinants of teacher productivity that are not captured by teacher credentials but that can be…

Finding accurate predictors of tertiary academic performance, specifically for disadvantaged students, is essential because of budget constraints and the need of the labour market to address employment equity. Increased retention, throughput and decreased dropout rates are vital. When making admission decisions, the under preparedness of students…

Value-added models in education research allow researchers to explore how a wide variety of policies and measured school inputs affect the academic performance of students. Researchers typically quantify the impacts of such interventions in terms of "effect sizes", i.e., the estimated effect of a one standard deviation change in the…

Education names and classifies individuals. This result seems unavoidable. For example, some students will graduate, and some will not. Those who graduate will be "graduates"; those who do not graduate will be labeled otherwise. The only way to avoid such labeling is to fail to make distinctions of any kind. Yet education is rife with…

The No Child Left Behind Act has brought great attention to the high school graduation rate as one of the mandatory accountability measures for public school systems. However, there is no consensus on how to calculate the high school graduation rate given the lack of longitudinal databases that track individual students. This study reviews…