As a result of federal efforts to hold individual teachers accountable for student learning based on the standardized test results of their students (Race to the Top, U.S. Department of Education, 2009), the use of value-added models of teacher performance as a component of teacher evaluation has been spreading rapidly. Often researchers and policymakers alike feel comfortable with imprecision ...

This paper investigates the use of teacher value-added estimates to assess the distribution of effective teaching across students of varying socioeconomic disadvantage in the presence of classroom composition effects. We examine, via simulations, how accurately commonly-used teacher-value added estimators recover the rank correlation between true and estimated teacher effects and a parameter re...

0227557 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Project 2061 for the Center for Curriculum Materials in Science. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NSF. We thank the entire MoDeLS research group, at eight institutions, for their help in thinking about these ideas. We also thank the preservice teachers with whom we work. A...

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 opposit...

Teacher and students can use WWW as a limitless source of learning material for nearly any subject. Yet, such abundance of content comes with the problem of finding the right piece at the right time. Conventional adaptive educational systems cannot support personalized access to open-corpus learning material as they rely on manually constructed content models. This paper presents an approach to...

BACKGROUND School climate has been linked with improved academic achievement and reduced discipline problems, and thus is often a target of school improvement initiatives. However, few studies have examined the extent to which student and teacher perceptions vary as a function of individual, classroom, and school characteristics, or the level of congruence between teachers' and their students' ...

Teacher education is the environment for the learning and instruction of prospective teachers. Its structure, components, and contents shape the development of relevant competences which enable prospective teachers to be effective in the classroom. But its relevance is questioned because respective research, characterised by inconclusive results, does not offer explanations about the reasons wh...

Research in the development of teacher cognition and teaching performance in K–12 classrooms has identified consistent challenges and patterns of behavior that are congruent with the predictions of dual-process models of cognition. However, cognitive models of information processing are not often used to synthesize these results. This article reviews findings from the research on teaching and t...

Inductive inference considers two types of queries: Queries to a teacher about the function to be learned and queries to a non-recursive oracle. This paper combines these two types | it considers three basic models of queries to a teacher (QEXXSucc], QEXX<] and QEX+]) together with membership queries to some oracle. The results for each of these three models of query-inference are the same: If ...