Many states and school districts have adopted Value-Added Models (VAMs) as part of educational accountability systems. The goal of these models, which are also referred to as Value-Added Assessment (VAA) Models, is to estimate effects of individual teachers or schools on student achievement while accounting for differences in student background. VAMs are increasingly promoted or mandated as a c...

Abstract. Value-added models have been widely used to assess the contributions of individual teachers and schools to students’ academic growth based on longitudinal student achievement outcomes. There is concern, however, that ignoring the presence of missing values, which are common in longitudinal studies, can bias teachers’ value-added scores. In this article, a flexible correlated random ef...

Teachers’ implementation of technology-enhanced student-centered learning environments (SCLEs) will be affected by their beliefs about effective practices. In order for student-centered programs to be used as intended, designers must be aware of the key issues that will shape their implementation and the beliefs teachers hold about these issues. This case study examined 15 teachers’ beliefs abo...

This paper introduces a teacher-student framework for reinforcement learning. In this framework, a teacher agent instructs a student agent by suggesting actions the student should take as it learns. However, the teacher may only give such advice a limited number of times. We present several novel algorithms that teachers can use to budget their advice effectively, and we evaluate them in two ex...

This article presents the results of a study about the views of mathematics held by54 primary and 42 secondary prospective teachers. Data were collected through aquestionnaire that included two open questions as well as a series of items to beassessed on a Likert scale. We compare the results obtained by these two means. Wealso compare the results concerning the primary student ...

Understanding the relationship between grading practices and student evaluations is especially important in higher education because of the increasing importance of this instrument in the promotion process. If evaluations can be increased by giving higher grades, then they are a flawed instrument for the evaluation of teaching. Further, this process may be contributing to the inflation of grade...

BACKGROUND Although teacher-student relationships lie at the heart of students' schooling experience, fundamental questions regarding these relationships remain unanswered. AIMS This study investigates three related questions about these relationships: To what extent do they change from the beginning to the end of a school year? Are any emergent changes associated with shifts in students' aca...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to develop and consider the usefulness of a new mixed-methods approach to evaluate the student-centredness of teaching and learning on undergraduate medical courses. An essential paradigm for the evaluation was the coherence between how teachers conceptualise their practice (espoused theories) and their actual practice (theories-in-use). METHODS The context ...

MaDiN (Ma)thematics and (Di)dactics (N)etwork is a fast growing knowledge base containing material about teaching mathematics (URL: http://visum2.uni-muenster.de ). Four universities in Germany participate in this project developing contents in different branches of primary, lower and upper secondary student teachers education in mathematics. The project is funded by the German ministry of scie...