The challenge of transforming underperforming schools and improving student achievement drives RAND's commitment to education. RAND research on teachers and teaching explores a wide range of topics, including instructional practices, technology in the classroom, class size, teacher recruitment and retention, and teacher quality and effectiveness.
Many factors contribute to a student's academic performance, but research suggests that, among school-related factors, teachers matter most. What's less clear is how to measure an individual teacher's effectiveness. A new RAND Education website features fact sheets, blog posts, research briefs, and more on this important issue.
Past Event
Numerous RAND Education researchers will present at the American Educational Research Association 2013 Annual Meeting, in San Francisco, CA April 27 through May 1, 2013. The theme of this year's meeting is “Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis.”
Report
This report examines how changes to the military-civilian faculty composition at the United States Air Force Academy might affect cadets' officership and academic development, cost, staffing challenges, and officer career development.
Past Event
RAND Education experts will present on technology curricula, measuring teacher effectiveness, and classroom observations at the SREE Spring 2013 Conference in Washington, D.C., March 7-9.
Journal Article
The goal of this study is to examine whether three recently implemented pay-for-performance programs had similar effects on teachers' motivation and reported practices.
Commentary
Structured observation protocols for assessing how teachers provide lessons to their students offer the opportunity to provide teachers with valuable feedback on how their practices could be improved, writes Terrance Dean Savitsky.
Periodical
Judging teachers' performance by that of their students is fraught with the potential for error and unintended consequences, but several states and districts have been striving to incorporate student performance data in ways that are accurate and fair.
Commentary
Research is starting to demonstrate that teaching, like all professions, is something that can be learned, continuously improved upon, and subject to the conditions under which it occurs, writes V. Darleen Opfer.
Commentary
An accurate combined measure of teacher effectiveness would be the gold standard to capture and communicate information about the quality of educators. While the challenges to building such a measure are significant, research can help guide the way.
Journal Article
Using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, researchers developed a model to compile data from multiple sources that could be used to make inferences about a teacher's impact on student achievement.
Journal Article
This report presents an in-depth discussion of the technical methods, findings, and implications of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project's random assignment study of teaching effectiveness measures.
Blog
A new RAND Education website provides objective, nonpartisan insights that can help inform the discussion on how to measure teacher effectiveness.
Report
This fact sheet examines teachers' impact on students and how effective teachers can be identified.
Report
This fact sheet describes common methods of measuring teaching effectiveness.
Report
This fact sheet examines what students' scores on achievement tests do and don't reveal about how well teachers are meeting expectations.
Report
This fact sheet describes value-added modeling and its limitations in measuring teaching effectiveness.
Report
This fact sheet describes student growth percentiles and their limitations in measuring teaching effectiveness.
Journal Article
One of the best ways to increase student learning is to simultaneously increase the time spent on learning and the quality of instruction.
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