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…

Evidence that teachers' short-term instructional effects persist over time and predict substantial long-run impacts on students' lives provides much of the impetus for a wide range of educational reforms focused on identifying and responding to differences in teachers' value-added to student learning. However, relatively little research has…

While most educators assume that not all students try their best on achievement tests, no current research examines if behaviors associated with low test effort, like rapidly guessing on test items, affect teacher value-added estimates. In this article, we examined the prevalence of rapid guessing to determine if this behavior varied by grade,…

High-quality measures of instructional practice are essential for research and evaluation of innovative instructional policies and programs, as well as for providing feedback to teachers and administrators. In this study, the authors examined whether using anchoring vignettes in web-based surveys improved the validity of teachers' self-assessments…