Empirical Bayes' (EB) estimation is a widely used procedure to calculate teacher value-added. It is primarily viewed as a way to make imprecise estimates more reliable. In this paper we review the theory of EB estimation and use simulated data to study its ability to properly rank teachers. We compare the performance of EB estimators with that of other widely used value-added estimators under d...

There is also a growing consensus that evidence of teachers’ contributions to student learning should be a component of teacher evaluation systems, along with evidence about the quality of teachers’ practice. “Value Added Models” (VAMs) for looking at gains in student test scores from one year to the next are promoted as tools to accomplish this goal. Policy makers can benefit from research abo...

Curriculum Evaluation of Teacher Training Courses in Education G. Ahmadi, Ph. D. The two year teacher training programs in Iran include courses in education that form the very foundation of the professional performance of the future teachers. As such, the curricula of these courses need to be evaluated in order to determine their probable shortcomings and take the necessary remedial steps...

Based on constructivist learning theories, this study focused on examining the use of an online discussion board in a graduate course as a place where forty-six inservice teachers could share experiences and ideas. Discussions held outside class were conducted by computer conferencing software. Data collection focused on online discussion transcripts of all the messages for three separate weeks...

In this contribution we discuss the duties and responsibilities which are important within teacher education to qualify for teaching students in the 21st century at school for acting competent in their future by including contemporary media in their learning. Based on a practiced teaching module the authors’ give an example, how to structure contemporary learning processes. This approach has be...

This article explains the impetus in the United States behind the drive to extend test-based accountability to teachers and the growing interest in employing valueadded models to generate the indicators to be used in teacher evaluation. The empirical literature finds that teaching quality is the most important school-related determinant of student. Yet, in the main, teacher evaluations are done...

Automatic generation of paraphrases for a given sentence is an important yet challenging task in natural language processing (NLP), and plays a key role in a number of applications such as question answering, information retrieval and dialogue. In this paper we present a deep reinforcement learning approach to paraphrase generation. Specifically, we propose a new model for the task, which consi...

Childhood overweight and obesity are a growing concern globally, and environments, including the home and school, can contribute to this epidemic. This paper assesses the reliability of two questionnaires (parent and teacher) used in the evaluation of a community-based childhood obesity prevention intervention, the eat well be active (ewba) Community Programs. Parents and teachers were recruite...

Distance Education Course (DEC) has been becoming more and more popular in many universities with the fast development of the Internet technology. The communication between the teacher and the students in DEC environment, however, is a more difficult problem than that of conventional courses. This paper proposes a real-time evaluation method to enhance the communications between the teacher and...

This paper is the first to systematically document the relationship between individual teacher performance incentives and student achievement using the United States data. We combine data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey on schools, students, and their families with our own survey conducted in 2000 regarding the use of teacher incentives. This survey on teacher incentives has uni...