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Value-Added Modeling in Education

Student performance reflects many factors beyond their teacher's effectiveness, yet teacher evaluations often reflect how well their students do on standardized tests. RAND researchers are nationally recognized for their work using value-added modeling to distinguish a teacher's impact from factors such as individual ability, family environment, past schooling, and peer influence.

Blog
The Challenges of Measuring Effective Teaching
While educators, policymakers, and parents may agree on the need for more effective teachers, they often use different criteria to judge whether schools are doing their job. Parents have varied priorities for what they want in teachers and in schools.
Nov 16, 2016
Commentary
Reauthorizing ESEA: Four Recommendations to Improve Teaching Effectiveness
Policies aimed at boosting teaching effectiveness are a key component of a strong ESEA reauthorization. Addressing discrepancies in teacher quality helps teachers improve, retains effective teachers, and makes the teaching profession an attractive option for those contemplating careers.
Feb 3, 2015
Commentary
Flexibility Is Key in Administration's Call for Teacher Equity Plans
Thirteen years of research have clarified that metrics like teacher experience and licensure reveal little about teachers' impact on student learning. The focus should be on disadvantaged students' access to effective teachers.
Aug 22, 2014
Commentary
A Better Method for Estimating Teacher Performance
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.
Feb 19, 2013
Commentary
States Tackle Education's Holy Grail: Measuring a Teacher's Effectiveness
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.
Jan 11, 2013
Blog
How Should We Measure Teacher Effectiveness?
Some of the most urgent and contentious debates taking hold in states and school districts around the country revolve around the question of how to accurately measure a teacher's effectiveness. A new RAND Education website provides objective, nonpartisan insights that can help inform the discussion.
Oct 3, 2012
Project
Measuring Teacher Effectiveness
Research suggests that, among school-related factors, teachers matter most to students' academic performance. What's less clear is how to measure an individual teacher's effectiveness. RAND's reports, fact sheets, blog posts, and research briefs provide clarity on this important issue.
Oct 1, 2012
Content
Value-Added Modeling 101
Value-added models, or VAMs, attempt to measure a teacher's impact on student achievement apart from other factors, such as individual ability, family environment, past schooling, and the influence of peers.
Oct 1, 2012
Journal Article
An Argument Approach to Observation Protocol Validity
This article develops a validity argument approach for use on observation protocols currently used to assess teacher quality for high-stakes personnel and professional development decisions.
Apr 1, 2012
Journal Article
Simultaneous One-Sided Tests with Application to Education Evaluation Systems
In this article, we discuss controlling simultaneous errors in classification of teachers or schools by a decision-theoretic approach.
Feb 1, 2012
Report
Missing Data in Value-Added Modeling of Teacher Effects
The extensive numbers of students with incomplete records and the tendency for those students to be lower-achieving presents a challenge for stakeholders attempting to develop or use value-added models in education.
Sep 6, 2011
Journal Article
A Model for Teacher Effects from Longitudinal Data Without Assuming Vertical Scaling
The authors developed a "generalized persistence" (GP) model, a Bayesian multivariate model for estimating teacher effects that accommodates longitudinal data that are not vertically scaled by allowing less than perfect correlation of a teacher's effects across test administrations.
Jan 6, 2011
Journal Article
Value-added: Assessing Teachers' Contributions to Student Achievement
Addresses complex issues related to teacher assessment and teacher quality.
Jan 1, 2010
Journal Article
The Intertemporal Variability of Teacher Effect Estimates
This article studies the year-to-year variability in value-added measures for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers from five large Florida school districts.
Sep 1, 2009
Journal Article
Exploring Student-Teacher Interactions in Longitudinal Achievement Data
This article develops a model for longitudinal student achievement data designed to estimate heterogeneity in teacher effects across students of different achievement levels.
Jan 1, 2009
Report
Value-Added Assessment in Practice
To encourage and facilitate data-driven decisionmaking, many states and districts have begun providing staff with information from value-added assessment systems—collections of complex statistical techniques that use multiple years of test-score data to estimate the causal effects of individual schools or teachers on student learning.
Oct 14, 2007
Report
Measuring Student Achievement Over Time
Longitudinal data tracking repeated measurements on individuals are highly valued for research because they offer controls for unmeasured individual heterogeneity that might otherwise bias results.
Sep 4, 2007
Journal Article
Bayesian Methods for Scalable Multivariate Value-Added Assessment
Interest in value-added models relying on longitudinal student-level test score data to isolate teachers' contributions to student achievement.
Jan 1, 2007
Report
The Sensitivity of Value-Added Teacher Effect Estimates to Different Mathematics Achievement Measures
Using longitudinal data from a cohort of middle school students from a large school district, researchers estimate separate “value-added” teacher effects for two subscales of a mathematics assessment under a variety of statistical models varying in form and degree of control for student background characteristics.
Jan 1, 2007
Journal Article
Challenges for Value-Added Assessment of Teacher Effects
The use of standardized test scores to facilitate school reform is now a cornerstone of education policy in the United States.
Jan 1, 2005

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Value-Added Modeling in Education

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RAND Education and Labor