The purpose of this study is to explore the correlation between state-recorded value- added (VA) scores and academic optimism (AO) scores, which measure teacher self-efficacy, trust, and academic emphasis. The sample for this study is 87 third through eighth grade Reading teachers, from fifty-five schools, in an urban school district in Ohio who…

Educational leaders are struggling with the issue of academic reform as it pertains to accountability for student achievement. With increasing pressures to improve student achievement, many states have adopted value-added measures to monitor student growth and teacher effectiveness. This study undertook a quantitative approach to examine the…

The increased use of value-added measures is a result of policymakers viewing traditional measures of teacher effectiveness as obsolete and unrelated to student achievement. Additionally, literature lacks substantial findings examining the relationship between principal observation ratings and a teacher's value-added scores based on the…

Teacher value-added measures (VAM) are designed to provide information regarding teachers' causal impact on the academic growth of students while controlling for exogenous variables. While some researchers contend VAMs successfully and authentically measure teacher causality on learning, others suggest VAMs cannot adequately control for exogenous…

The purpose of this non-experimental study was to determine whether teacher cognitive and behavioral agility relates to student achievement as measured by their value-added model (VAM) score and their performance evaluation measured through the Marzano instructional practice (IP) framework, and whether that relationship is moderated by contextual…

This study addressed the impact of VAM, concerns with VAM data, uses and interventions educational leaders provided teachers, and components perceived as necessary for VAM effectiveness as an evaluation tool. The demographics used for this study were position, school size, and experience. Due to the documented need for educational accountability…

In order to change the direction of mathematics education, the training of elementary teachers in the United States needs to be of equal or higher quality than top preforming countries. However, pre-service elementary teachers in the United States fall behind their peers in other countries in mathematical content knowledge and mathematical…

Despite a decade of reform driven by the NCLB legislation, there continues to be a significant gap in mathematics achievement between race/ethnicity and socioeconomic groupings of students. This study examines the practice of tracking and an effort to improve mathematics achievement by eliminating the general level mathematics track. The suburban…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has put many schools under a lot of pressure to meet its high demands. In this quantitative study, the effects that the NCLB act has had on students' opportunity to learn (OTL) and Subject Level Success (SS) from 2004 to 2012 in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade math coursework (Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and…