Value Added

The authors estimate the importance of teachers in Chicago public high schools using matched student-teacher administrative data. 

This article describes a school district administrator's research on optimal coaching experiences for classroom teachers. This research was done with the intent of gaining a better understanding of how coaching affects student learning. 

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a classroom-teacher-delivered reading intervention for struggling readers called the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), designed particularly for kindergarten and first-grade teachers and their struggling students in rural, low-wealth communities. 

Value-added assessment proves that very good teaching can boost student learning and that family background does not determine a student's destiny. Students taught by highly effective teachers several years in a row earn higher test scores than students assigned to particularly ineffective teachers.

Value-Added Models (VAMs) has been embraced by many states and school districts as part of educational accountability systems. Value-Added Assessment (VAA) Models attempt to estimate effects of individual teachers or schools on student achievement while accounting for differences in student background. This paper provides a summary of the American Statistical Associations analysis of the efficacy of value-added modeling in education.

This article discusses instructional coaching as well as the eight factors that can increase the likelihood that coaching will be a real fix for a school. Instructional coaching holds much potential for improving the way teachers teach and the way students learn, but that potential will only be realized if leaders plan their coaching program with care. 

This paper evaluates the impact of a performance-related pay scheme for teachers in England. 

The authors describe three forms of functional assessment used in applied behavior analysis and explain three potential reasons why OBM has not yet adopted the use of such techniques.

This study uses statewide completer survey data from North Carolina to assess whether perceptions of preparation quality and opportunities to learn during teacher preparation predict completers’ value-added estimates, evaluation ratings, and retention.

The book presents many examples of Questioning the Author (QtA) in action as children engage with narrative and expository texts to construct meaning.

The book presents many examples of Questioning the Author (QtA) in action as children engage with narrative and expository texts to construct meaning.

This paper introduces analysis techniques and results showing how student growth percentiles, a normative growth analysis technique, can be used to examine the illuminate the relationship between standards based accountability systems and the performance standards on which they are based.

This study used a delayed multiple-baseline across-participants design to analyze the effects of coaching on special education teachers’ implementation of function-based interventions with students with severe disabilities. This study also examined the extent to which teachers could generalize function-based interventions in different situations. 

This article reports on a 4-year longitudinal study of the effects of Literacy Collaborative (LC), a schoolwide reform model that relies primarily on the oneon-one coaching of teachers as a lever for improving student literacy learning.

This paper advocates the use of time-series experiments for the development and evaluation of community interventions.

Teacher professional development is essential to efforts to improve our schools. This article maps the terrain of research on this important topic. It first provides an overview of what we have learned as a field, about effective professional development programs and their impact on teacher learning. 

This article examined the differences in effectiveness of teacher preparation programs that supply teachers to New York City schools.  One of the important findings is that preparation directly linked to practice benefits teachers in their first year.

By estimating the effect of teacher attributes using a value-added model, the analyses in this paper predict that observable qualifications of teachers resulted in average improved achievement for students in the poorest decile of schools of .03 standard deviations.

These five articles begin to build a bridge between literature. specifically, they report on how the use of the indicators derived from value-added models (VAM) actually payout in practice and give carefully consideration to how the design and implementation of teacher evaluation system could be modified to enhance the positive impact of accountability and mitigate the negative consequences,

This report is a lay person’s guide to value added modeling as a means of evaluating teacher performace.

This brief explains how and why Strategic Data Project (SDP) uses value-added measures for our diagnostic work. We also explain how value-added measures relate to other measures of teacher effectiveness and the limitations of value-added measures.

This paper examines the issue of efficacy of value-added measures in evaluating teachers. This question is important in understanding whether value-added analysis provides unbiased estimates of teachers’ impact on student achievement and whether these teachers improve long-term student outcomes.

This paper examines the issue of efficacy of value-added measures in evaluating teachers. This question is important in understanding whether value-added analysis provides unbiased estimates of teachers’ impact on student achievement and whether these teachers improve long-term student outcomes.

This paper examines the issue of the efficacy of valued-added measures in evaluating the effectiveness of teachers and long term impact on student’s lives.

This paper evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records.

The purpose of this overview is to provide information about the role of formal teacher evaluation, the research that examines the practice, and its impact on student outcomes.

The purpose of this paper on value-added research in education is to define this type of research, provide an overview of how it has been conducted, and discuss its benefits and limitations.

This study examines the theoretical and practical implications of ranking teachers with a one-dimensional value-added metric when teacher effectiveness varies across subjects or student types.

In this report, the author aim to provide an accessible introduction to these new measures of teaching quality and put them into the broader context of concerns over school quality and achievement gaps.

This text was written to help the reader acquire a base of knowledge about classical psychometrics and to integrate new ideas into that framework of knowledge.

Popular modes of evaluating teachers are fraught with inaccuracies and inconsistencies, but the field has identified better approaches. Value-added models enable researchers to use statistical methods to measure changes in student scores over time while considering student characteristics and other factors often found to influence achievement.

A growing number of researchers are studying whether value-added measures can do a good job of measuring the contribution of teachers to test score growth. Here I summarize a handful of analyses that shed light on two questions.

This paper examines factors that lead to bias as well offers specific recommendations to journals, funders, ethics committees, and universities designed to reduce reporting bias.

As school leaders, principals can influence student achievement in a number of ways, such as: hiring and firing of teachers, monitoring instruction, and maintaining student discipline, among many others. We measure the effect of individual principals on gains in math and reading achievement between grades 4 and 7 using a value-added framework

Twenty percent of high school students take four or more courses in career and technical education (CTE). Despite this high rate of participation, little is known about what constitutes high-quality CTE and whether high-quality CTE allows participants to accumulate meaningful knowledge and skills to succeed in a career. This study from the Association for Education Finance and Policy examined the impact of participating in CTE on high school attendance, high school completion, professional certifications, and performance on standardized test scores. The evidence suggests that a high-quality CTE program boosts on-time graduation for higher income students and for lower income .

In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, (SGPs) framework, eschews all controls for student covariates and schooling environments. The second approach, value-added models (VAMs), controls for student background characteristics and under some conditions can be used to identify the causal effects of schools and teachers. The third approach, also VAM-based, fully levels the playing field so that the correlation between school- and teacher-level growth measures and student demographics is essentially zero. We argue that the third approach is the most desirable for use in educational evaluation systems.

Value-added estimates of teacher or school quality are increasingly used for both high- and low-stakes accountability purposes, making understanding of their limitations critical.

This paper exams teachers' views on unions, tenure, pay-for-performance, alternative certification, and other issues and finds that while most teachers are strong supporters of standards, a sense of vulnerability, along with fears of politics and favoritism, make them loyal to the tenure system, loyal to their unions, and highly skeptical about pay tied to student test scores.

This paper evaluates the reasonableness of assumptions of weighted approaches to account for building level effects when value added modeling is used to evaluate teachers.  In urban schools and ultimately teachers in those schools were negatively impacted by using weighted models to account for building level effects.

This article aimed to present frameworks and practices coaches can use with classroom teachers to facilitate the implementation of evidence-based interventions in schools.

This paper report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given that new workforce policies implicitly assume that effectiveness is a stable attribute within teachers.

This paper report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given that new workforce policies implicitly assume that effectiveness is a stable attribute within teachers. 

In this paper we examine the mobility of early-career teachers of varying quality, measured using value-added estimates of teacher performance.

Interview and survey data from six school districts that have recently implemented new evaluation systems with classroom observations provide evidence that principals tend to rely less on test scores in their human capital decisions. 

This argument makes the case that policies that require states’ student test scores to account for 40-50% of the overall score of teacher performance in value added modeling may produce a significant number of teachers to be falsly identified as ineffective.  Using such value added models may leave school districts legally vulnerable to law suits.

A research synthesis confirms the difficulty of translating professional development into student achievement gains despite the intuitive and logical connection. Those responsible for planning and implementing professional development must learn how to critically assess and evaluate the effectiveness of what they do.

Policymakers and school administrators have embraced value-added models of teacher effectiveness as tools for educational improvement. Teacher value-added estimates may be viewed as complicated scores. This Paper examines the use of value-added modeling as a tool to identify effective teachers from ineffective instructors.

The precise method of attributing differences in classroom achievement to teachers is the
subject of considerable discussion and analysis.

This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity.

In" Value-Added Measures in Education", Douglas N. Harris takes on one of the most hotly
debated topics in education. Drawing on his extensive work with schools and districts, he
sets out to help educators and policymakers understand this innovative approach to
assessment and the issues associated with its use.

The authors examine the relationships between observational ratings of teacher performance, principals’ evaluations of teachers’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills and test-score based measures of teachers’ productivity. 

This paper examines issues of value-added modeling. It describes what value-added modeling is and how it works in education.

This paper examines how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. The study estimates the relative weight that school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics and finds evidence that principals do consider teacher absences and value-added measures, along with several demographic characteristics, in determining which teachers to dismiss.

This paper examines how well principals can distinguish between more and less effective teachers. To put principal evaluations in context, we compare them with the traditional determinants of teacher compensation-education and experience-as well as value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.

This study draws on 32 interviews from a random sample of teachers and 2 years of survey data from more than 12,000 teachers per year to measure their perceptions of the clarity, practicality, and cost of the new system.

This book provides research as well as case studies of successful professional development strategies and practices for educators.

This study used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, the authors used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to classrooms.

In this study the authors designed the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to test replicable methods for identifying effective teachers. In past reports, the authors described three approaches to measuring different aspects of teaching: student surveys, classroom observations, and a teacher's track record of student achievement gains on state tests.

This paper combines information from classroom-based observations and measures of teachers' ability to improve student achievement as a step toward addressing these challenges. The results point to the promise of teacher evaluation systems that would use information from both classroom observations and student test scores to identify effective teachers.

Substantial variation was found in the relationship of evaluators' ratings of teachers and value-added measures of the average achievement of the teachers' students. The results did not yield a simple explanation for the differences in validity of evaluators' ratings. Instead, evaluators' decisions were found to be a complex and idiosyncratic function of motivation, skill, and context.

this study presents and apply a framework for measuring the cost of coaching programs to 3 schools. Then the study discusses strategies for reducing the average cost of instructional coaching. 

This article provides a review of areas of agreement and disagreement of vaious aspects of value added modeling.

The education policy community is abuzz with interest in value-added modeling as a way to estimate the effectiveness of schools and especially teachers. Value-added models provide useful information, but that information is error-prone and has a number of other important limitations.

This study evaluated the extent to which the large performance gains shown on KIRIS represented real improvements in student learning rather than inflation of scores. 

This study review the empirical literature on teacher coaching and conduct meta-analyses to estimate the mean effect of coaching programs on teachers’ instructional practice and students’ academic achievement.

The authors conducted a comprehensive review of research to identify the impact of coaching on changes in preservice and in-service teachers’ implementation of evidence-based practices.

This study examined the effects of in-service plus follow-up coaching on first grade teachers’ accurate delivery of three research-based strategies during math instruction.

This study examined the effects of in-service support plus coaching on kindergarten teachers’ accurate delivery of group instructional units in math.

The seven guiding principles in this manuscript offer research-based directions for literacy coaching.

Three questions are addressed. First, what are the principles behind creating optimal teacher incentives, and how close do the actual structures in Sweden and the US conform to the ideal ones? Second, how much is performance affected by creating incentives for current teachers, and how much by changing the pool of teacher applicants? Third, do teacher preferences align with those of their students and of society in general, and if not, why not? Associated with each of these questions are policy implications that may remedy existing distortions.

This paper reviews the evaluation of a value added model for evaluating teacher preparation programs in Texas.  The model produced statistically meaningful data but the results were sensitive to decisions about accountability critieria, the selection of teachers, and the selection of control variables.  Different decisions across each of these variables would impact the results of the value added modeling.

The United States has committed to improving the lives of students with disabilities for over 40 years. Since the advent of Federal Law PL 94-142 in 1975 that mandated a free and appropriate education for all students regardless of ability and six reauthorizations of legislation, the federal government has emphasized the need to prepare students with disabilities for post-secondary education, careers, and independent living. The federal investment in funding special education services exceeds $15 Billion annually. It is reasonable to ask, are student with disabilities substantially benefiting from these efforts? The National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS) provides the most recent data on youth with disabilities and efforts to address their needs. The study used surveys in 2012 and 2013 on a nationally representative set of nearly 13,000 students. The student included were mostly those with an individualized education program (IEP) and expected to receive special education services. The data reveal participation in key transition activities by youth with an IEP and their parents have declined, although they are just as likely to have gone to an IEP meeting. The findings from this report suggest a closer examination of current practices is warranted with a focus on achieving the stated outcomes the laws were designed to remedy.

Using longitudinal data from a cohort of middle school students from a large school district,
we estimate separate “value‐added” teacher effects for two subscales of a mathematics
assessment under a variety of statistical models varying in form and degree of control for
student background characteristics.

About 11,500 Los Angeles Unified elementary school teachers and 470 elementary schools are included in The Times' updated database of "value-added" ratings.

This report documents differences in the earnings and employment patterns of U.S. adults with different levels of education. It also compares health-related behaviors, reliance on public assistance programs, civic participation, and indicators of the well-being of the next generation. This year's report also presents data on variation in earnings by different characteristics such as gender, race/ethnicity, occupation, college major, and sector. 

This study demonstrates mathematically that the use of such “construct-shifting” vertical scales in longitudinal, value-added models introduces remarkable distortions in the value-added estimates of the majority of educators

In this brief, we discuss what is and is not known about how well value‐added measures level the playing field for teachers by controlling for student characteristics. 

In this brief, we discuss the challenges of using value-added to evaluate teachers of students with disabilities.

The current study extends recent value-added modeling approaches for longitudinal student achievement data Lockwood et al. [J. Educ. Behav. Statist. 32 (2007) 125–150] to allow data to be missing not at random via random effects selection and pattern mixture models, and applies those methods to data from a large urban school district to estimate effects of elementary school mathematics teachers. 

This article addresses the potential sources of bias that can be introduced into value added modeling by the decisions that are made about the  details of the model.  There is a call for a refinement of procedures used when applying value added modeling.

Value added modeling has become of interest to policymakers interested in evaluating teacher performance.  The authors argue that the models work well when the schools in the sample are homogenous but as heterogeneity of the student population  increases estimates of teacher effects are likely to confounded.

Value added modeling has become of interest to policymakers interested in evaluating teacher performance.  The authors argue that the models work well when the schools in the sample are homogenous but as heterogeneity of the student population  increases estimates of teacher effects are likely to confounded.

This study examines implementation of alternative student growth measures in a sample of eight school districts that were early adopters of the measures. It builds on an earlier Region­ al Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic report that described the two types of alterna­tive student growth measures—alternative assessment–based value-added models and student learning objectives—in the early-adopting districts.

This study documents the implementation of research-based strategies to minimize the occurrence of reading difficulties in a first-grade population. Three strategies were implemented. 

This paper summarizes validity evidence pertaining to several different implementations of the Framework. It is based primarily on reviewing the published and unpublished studies that have looked at the relationship between teacher evaluation ratings made using systems based on the Framework and value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.

This paper reports on the results of the analysis of an additional year of evaluation and student achievement data at some research.

How important are teenagers' cognitive skills in predicting subsequent labor market success? Do cognitive skills pay off in the labor market only for students who go to college? Does college benefit only students who enter with strong basic skills? These questions are often part of current policy debates about how to improve the earnings prospects for young Americans. 

This paper reviews the various issues and challenges associated with value added modeling.  It concludes with a discussion of how value added modeling  can be used in conjuction with other measures to identify teacher strengths and weaknesses.

This study examines the impact of 2 forms of professional development on prekindergarten teachers' early language and literacy practice: coursework and coaching. 

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ESEA Reauthorization

This paper describes one effort to use value added modeling to evaluate teacher preparation program in one state.

Effects of a 1-semester professional development (PD) intervention that included expert coaching with Head Start teachers were investigated in a randomized controlled trial with 88 teachers and 759 children. 

This study evaluted the impact of coaching on the implementation of an intervention.  Coaching with higher rates of performance feedback resulted in the highest level of treatment integrity.

This paper disentangles the impact of schools and teachers in influencing achievement with special attention given to the potential problems of omitted or mismeasured variables and of student and school selection. 

This study used a version of value added modeling to evaluate the impact of teacher turnover has on student achievement.

The author develop falsification tests for three widely used VAM specifications, based on the idea that future teachers cannot influence students' past achievement. 

Most children with autism rely on schools as their primary source of intervention, yet research has suggested that teachers rarely use evidence-based practices. To address the need for improved educational outcomes, a previously tested consultation intervention called the Collaborative Model for Promoting Competence and Success was evaluated in a 2nd randomized controlled trial, with the addition of a web-based group. 

This research from the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project, UCLA, and California Dropout Research Project shows that the overuse of suspensions in California schools is harming student achievement and graduation rates, and causing billions of dollars in economic damage. The financial consequences of school suspensions, including both additional costs borne by taxpayers as a result of suspensions and lost economic benefit, are quantified. The impact of school suspension varies widely by school district, with California’s largest districts incurring the greatest losses. For example, suspensions in the Los Angeles Unified School District for a 10th grade cohort are estimated to cause $148 million in economic damage. The report calculates a total statewide economic burden of $2.7 billion over the lifetime of the single 10th grade cohort.

Using data from 35 seventh-grade teachers and 2,026 students across seven schools, we employ VA methods to measure teacher contributions to students’ motivational orientations (mastery and performance achievement goals) and their mathematics performance. 

In this article, we describe and report on the results of a study in Texas that tested 2 models of professional development for classroom teachers as a way of improving their practices and increasing the reading achievement of their students. 

This paper describes the mixed method model Tennessee developed to evaluate teacher contributions to student achievement.  It desribes how they resolved some of the challenges to using value added modeling.

The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System determines the effectiveness of school systems, schools, and teachers based on student academic growth over time.

The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System determines the effectiveness of school systems, schools, and teachers based on student academic growth over time. Research conducted utilizing data from the TVAAS database has shown that race, socioeconomic level, class size, and classroom heterogeneity are poor predictors of student academic growth. Rather, the effectiveness of the teacher is the major determinant of student academic progress.

This paper attempts to untangle some of the competing claims about the value of value added modeling.  It concludes that it should not be used as the sole measure of teacher performance but should be part of a larger accountability system.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of multilevel support on first-grade teachers' accurate use of research-based strategies during beginning reading instruction and the extent to which teachers maintained use of these strategies. 

A recent large-scale evaluation of Reading Recovery, a supplemental reading program for young struggling readers, supports previous research that found it to be effective.  In a 4 year, federally funded project, almost 3,500 students in 685 schools found that generally students benefitted from the intervention. Students receiving Reading Recovery receive supplemental services in a 1:1 instructional setting for 30 minutes 5 days a week from an instructor trained in Reading Recovery.  In the study reported here, students who received Reading Recovery had effect sizes of .35-.37 relative to a control group across a number of measures of reading.  These represent moderate effect sizes and account for about a 1.5 month increase in skill relative to the control group.  Even though the research supports the efficacy of the intervention, it also raises questions about its efficiency.  The schools that participated in the study served about 5 students and the estimated cost per student has ranged from $2,000-$5,000.  These data raise questions about the wisdom of spending this much money per student for growth of about a month and a half.

This study examines the relations between school context variables and teachers’ feeling of belonging, emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and motivation to leave the teaching profession. Six aspects of the school context were measured: value consonance, supervisory support, relations with colleagues, relations with parents, time pressure, and discipline problems.

the authors examine how the five profiled systems are addressing assessment quality, evaluating teachers in nontested subjects and grades, and assigning teachers responsibility for particular students. The authors also examine what is and is not known about the quality of various student performance measures used by school systems.

This paper addresses the unique challenges posed by special education when using value added modeling to evaluate teacher effectiveness.

A soon to be published meta-analysis of Direct Instruction (DI) curricula that reviews research on DI curricula between 1966-2016 reports that DI curricula produced moderate to large effect sizes across the curriculum areas reading, math, language, and spelling.  The review is notable because it reviews a much larger body of DI research than has occurred in the past and covers a wide range of experimental designs (from single subject to randomized trials).  328 studies were reviewed and almost 4,000 effects were considered.  Given the variability in research designs and the breadth of the effects considered, it suggests that DI curricula produce robust results.  There was very little decline during maintenance phases of the study and greater exposure to the curricula resulted in greater effects.

In this article, the authors describe key features of the multi-tiered support (MTS) continuum of intervention and assessment and present a case study to illustrate implementation of some components of the framework with four middle school teachers.

This study examined the effectiveness of a classroom teacher intervention, the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), in helping struggling readers in kindergarten and first grade. This intervention used biweekly literacy coaching in the general education classroom to help classroom teachers use diagnostic strategies with struggling readers in one-on-one 15-min sessions.  

"The Mirage" describes the widely held perception among education leaders that they already know how to help teachers improve, and that they could achieve their goal of great teaching in far more classrooms if they just applied what they knew more widely.

The authors examine the causes and consequences of the status of teacher evaluation and its implications for the current national debate about performance pay for teachers. The report also examines a number of national, state, and local evaluation systems that offer potential alternatives to current practice.

In this study, the results of five training studies evaluating the effects of a coaching program for use in Dutch primary and secondary schools are described.

This report examines the pervasive and longstanding failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of teachers. 

U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question -- Will the policy work? -- too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is an evidence-based policy--a rigorous approach that draws on careful data collection, experimentation, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what the problem is, which ways it can be addressed, and the probable impacts of each of these ways. 

 Due to the increased need to support teachers' use of evidence-based practices in multi-tiered systems of support such as RTI [Response to Intervention] and PBIS [Positive Behavior Interventions and Support], coaching can extend and strengthen professional development. This paper describes a multi-level approach to coaching and provides implications for practice and research.

The authors examine the effectiveness of replacing low performing teachers relative to using formative assessment as a means of increasing student outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to examine research to answer the question, What is the impact of teacher professional development on student achievement.