The Obama administration’s 2009 launch of Race to the Top, a competitive grant program aimed at incentivizing states to improve teacher accountability at their schools, marked the start of an unprecedented trend toward the use of merit-based measurements in teacher evaluations. Teachers have long been regarded as the keys to student success, and as such, both education scholars and citizens hav...

The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) employs a sophisticated statistical methodology to estimate the aggregated yearly growth in student learning, as reflected in changes in test scores in five tested academic subjects. It assumes that changes in test scores from one year to the next accurately reflect student progress in learning. By tracking progress and linking it to schools a...

There is a growing interest among the higher education principals and policy makers to improve teacher evaluation methods and more important than that to use the evaluation data. A number of research studies implied the ineffective instruction of ESP courses in Iran (Atai, 2002; Eslami, 2005; Hayati, 2008; Ahmadi, 2008; Sherkatolabbasi & Mahdavi, 2012; Boniadi, Ghojazadeh & Rahmatvand, 2013). T...

Introduction. Students' evaluation of teaching is a major concern in higher education. In this regard, during the past 30 years hundreds of papers have been published which because of various grounds from valid, reliable to useless, such papers cannot be easily summarized. The present study investigated for two purposes, first was to out line opinions of two groups of advocates and opposites a...

This study investigated the relationship between student perceptions of others in an online class and both affective and cognitive learning outcomes. Data were gathered from student survey responses and instructor evaluation of performance. Results from this study indicated significant correlations between student perceptions of the presence of other students in the class and scores on an attit...

This paper provides a review of recent policy initiatives to reform teacher compensation systems and evidence regarding the effect of these policies. The first section examines the current structure of teacher compensation in the U.S. K-12 public education system. The compensation “system” for teachers is fragmented and uncoordinated. Teacher compensation is largely set by salary schedules that...

This paper addresses the use of technology in the classroom, more specifically of pen-based devices such as Tablet PCs. It describes Cuizz, a Classroom Presenter plug-in that facilitates the teachers’ immediate assessment, during class, of the students’ learning. Cuizz allows the teacher to change the course of their class based on a quick, activity-based evaluation of the students’ learning of...