Using value-added models, we find that high schools impact students' self-reported socioemotional development (SED) by enhancing social well-being and promoting hard work. Conditional on schools' test score impacts, schools that improve SED reduce school-based arrests, and increase high-school completion, college-going, and college persistence.…

Previous research has examined how subjective task-value and expectancy of success influence the appraisal of value-promoting messages used by teachers prior to high-stakes examinations. The aim of this study was to examine whether message-frame (gain or loss-framed messages) also influences the appraisal of value-promoting messages. Two hundred…

Educators are using growth models for a variety of accountability, instructional planning, and evaluation purposes in U.S. schools. This white paper, with a focus on special education populations, provides state and local education personnel with an overview of issues to consider with growth models, a look at models currently in use, and a…

The contributions in this collection provide important answers and compelling evidence that honors programming does contribute something above and beyond what honors students themselves bring to the educational experience. While many of the chapters rely on analytic methods that are more widely used in some fields than in others, authors have…

Because the pandemic exacerbated chronic absenteeism in many parts of the country, the need to understand how schools can improve student attendance has never been greater. Accordingly, this study breaks new ground by examining high schools' contributions to attendance after accounting for individual students' prior absenteeism and other…

In this study, we investigated the factor structure underlying the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement using confirmatory and exploratory factor-analytic methods and under conditions of multilevel (nested) data structures and ordinal measurement scales. We found evidence of generally poor fit with the system's posited first-order,…

The majority of states include value-added models (VAMs) or some other measure of student academic growth as a component of their teacher evaluation systems. However, there is considerable disagreement among researchers about whether states and school districts should use student growth measures to make high-stakes personnel decisions. Many…

Policies that require the use of information about student achievement to evaluate teacher performance are becoming increasingly common across the United States, but there is some question as to how or whether to use student test-based teacher evaluations when student assessments change. We bring empirical evidence to bear on this issue.…

In 2016, Walstad and Wagner developed a procedure to split pre-test and post-test responses into four learning types: positive, negative, retained, and zero learning. This disaggregation is not only useful in academic studies; but also provides valuable insight to the practitioner: an instructor would take different mitigating actions in response…

A picture is worth a thousand words! Extension professionals are often looking for the picture that best captures an event and tells its story. Look beneath the surface, though, and a picture is worth much more. Developing a 4-H press corps results in a collection of useful photos but has the added benefit of providing 4-H members with an…

The traditional approach to estimating the consistency of school effects across subject areas and the stability of school effects across time is to fit separate value-added multilevel models to each subject or cohort and to correlate the resulting empirical Bayes predictions. We show that this gives biased correlations and these biases cannot be…

While much has been written about the effects of standardized testing on student achievement, less work has addressed how parents take up this information. Drawing on a survey of 286 parents in a diverse urban school district, this research illuminates three aspects of parental response to test score information: 1) how parents relate various…

The accountability movement in education since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has produced value-added evaluation policies in the United States that have resulted in discord and undesirable responses among many teachers. Despite investigations into the validity of value-added evaluation policies and descriptive reports of teachers' responses…

The Pennsylvania Educator Effectiveness System strives to place an effective teacher in every classroom. This evaluation system incorporates the use of value-added growth measures, not only at the teacher level, but also at the building level. These building level scores are included in every teacher's yearly evaluation. This study sought to…

In Bangladesh, despite significant progress in access, equity and public examination success, poor student performance in mathematics in secondary schools has become a major concern. An extensive review of research has shown that teachers account to a large extent for student learning and achievement gains. Although educational research has…