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Eric.ed.gov – A Summary of Professional Development Research, FY 2006-FY 2016

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) supports research that contributes to the identification of effective strategies for improving the performance of current teachers and other instructional personnel, and related services providers in ways that increase student learning and achievement, social and behavioral skills, and high school transition outcomes for students with or at risk for disabilities. This report presents highlights of NCSER-funded research that: (1) targets teacher data-based decision-making; (2) content area professional development in language, reading and math; (3) professional development for early childhood teachers; (4) professional development for teachers of children with autism spectrum disorders; and (5) tools for evaluating special education teachers. [This report was summarized by Robert Ochsendorf and Katherine Taylor.] Link til kilde

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Eric.ed.gov – The Content, Predictive Power, and Potential Bias in Five Widely Used Teacher Observation Instruments. REL 2017-191

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: School districts and states across the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic Region and the country as a whole have been modifying their teacher evaluation systems to identify more effective and less effective teachers and provide better feedback to improve instructional practice. The new systems typically include components related to student achievement growth and instruments for observing and rating instructional practice. Many school districts and states are considering adopting commercially available instruments for the instructional practice component of their evaluation systems. Yet little data are available to help districts and states choose among available instruments or determine which dimensions of instructional practice merit the greatest emphasis. Most existing data comparing different observation instruments, including their statistical characteristics and their relationship to student achievement, come from the Bill & Melinda… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Using Subjective Teacher Evaluations to Examine Principals’ Personnel Management

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Teacher evaluation is at the center of current education policy reform. Most evaluation systems rely at least in part on principals’ assessments of teachers, and their discretionary judgments carry substantial weight. However, we know relatively little about what they value when determining evaluations and high stakes personnel decisions. The author leverages unique data from a public charter school district to explore the extent to which school administrators’ formative evaluations of teachers align with teacher and school effectiveness and predict future personnel decisions. While previous research has examined administrators’ subjective evaluations of teachers in surveys and in practice, this study links a detailed evaluation in practice with multiple types of personnel decisions to provide new insights into administrator decision-making. A better understanding of the teacher contributions that administrators… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Do More, Add More, Earn More: Teacher Salary Redesign Lessons from 10 First-Mover Districts

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: William Taylor, 29, a third generation Washington, D.C. resident stands out for a number of reasons. For one, he is an African American man who taught math at an elementary school for many years. Taylor excelled in the role, so much so that he now coaches his fellow math teachers at Aiton Elementary School, which is located in a high-poverty Washington D.C. neighborhood. He has also been profiled in the national news–specifically in “The Atlantic”–where it was noted that, in a typical school year, 60 percent of Taylor’s students start their first day in his class doing math below grade level, but by the end of the year, 90 percent of his students are performing above grade level. For his exemplary work Taylor earned $131,000 in 2013–another… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Impacts of the Retired Mentors for New Teachers Program. REL 2017-225

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This study evaluates the impact of the Retired Mentors for New Teachers program, a two-year mentoring program at the elementary school level developed by Aurora Public Schools in Colorado. Many of the district’s schools serve a large percentage of economically disadvantaged children, experience high teacher turnover, and hire newer, less experienced teachers. The program addresses these challenges using master educators who recently retired from the district to provide tailored one-on-one mentoring to new teachers. The program requires mentees to meet weekly one-on-one with their mentor and monthly in school-level groups over the course of two years. This study was undertaken by Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Central in collaboration with Aurora Public Schools. It used a randomized controlled trial to assess the impacts of the Retired Mentors for… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Performance and Preparation: Alignment between Student Achievement, Teacher Ratings, and Parent Perceptions in Urban Middle-Grades Mathematics Classrooms

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The middle grades are a critical transition period in students’ mathematics trajectories, as students move from arithmetic to the more complex and abstract concepts of algebra. Teachers’ and parents’ judgments of students’ math abilities in these years are important to instructional planning and decision making for teachers, and can advise parents and students on future course placement. This study specifically examined teacher and parent judgments of students’ performance and preparedness for the next grade level in 5th and 6th grades mathematics. Results demonstrate that teacher and parent perceptions of students’ abilities are not calibrated to national norms, but to local contexts. Our findings are similar to other work suggesting that high poverty school contexts may provide teachers and parents a false comparative context for judging how well… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – The Impact of Teacher Observations with Coordinated Professional Development on Student Performance: A 27-State Program Evaluation

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The impact of teacher observations in alignment with professional development (PD) on teacher efficacy was quantified for 292 schools in 110 districts within 27 U.S. States. Teacher observations conducted by school leaders or designated internal coaches were coordinated with PD offerings aligned with intended teacher improvements. The PD involved throughout was an online, on-demand system teachers accessed as convenient with a range of PD assistance regarding teaching techniques and participative teacher/user interactive communities for collaboratively posting and downloading PD-related materials. Results indicate that systemic teacher observations, coupled with aligned PD, resulted in significantly improved student achievement in reading and math on standardized assessments. Link til kilde

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Eric.ed.gov – The Relationship between Growth Scores and the Overall Observation Ratings for Teachers in a Public School System in Tennessee

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the TVAAS growth score given by the Tennessee Department of Education and the overall Tennessee Educator Assessment Model (TEAM) observation rating for teachers in grades 3 through 8. The participating county public school system for this study is located in Northeast Tennessee. Participants were teachers in the school system teaching Math, English/Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies in grades 3 through 8 in 10 elementary schools, 6 middle schools, and 2 K-8 schools. Specifically, this research examined the relationship between the TEAM observation scores and overall TVAAS growth score given to the teacher from the Tennessee Department of Education based upon yearly-standardized test scores. Research reinforced mixed views about the validity and purpose of teacher evaluation… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Does Evaluation Distort Teacher Effort and Decisions? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Policy of Retesting Students. CEP Discussion Paper No. 1612

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Performance evaluation may change employee effort and decisions in unintended ways, for example, in multitask jobs where the evaluation measure captures only a subset of (differentially weights) the job tasks. We show evidence of this multitask distortion in schools, with teachers allocating effort across students (tasks). Teachers are evaluated based on student test scores; students who fail the test are retested 2-3 weeks later; and only the higher of the two scores is used in the teachers’ evaluations. This retesting feature creates a sharp difference in the returns to teacher effort directed at failing versus passing students, even though both barely failing and barely passing students have arguably equal educational claim on (returns to) teacher effort. Using RD methods, we show that students who barely fail the… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Not So Elementary: Primary School Teacher Quality in Top-Performing Systems

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Concerns about inadequate development of subject expertise for American elementary school teachers have been well documented. There are many exceptions to this narrative, and there are many exemplary U.S. teacher preparation programs. However, it is clear that, overall, the preparation of elementary teachers in the United States in key subject areas has been inadequate. So, what are systems that have high-performing learning outcomes in key subjects doing to ensure quality teaching in math, science and literacy? This report analyses whether and how high-performing systems (specifically those in jurisdictions of Japan, Finland, Hong Kong, and Shanghai) have supported the subject expertise of their elementary school teachers. The findings highlight how different parts of these systems constantly reinforce the development of deep subject expertise in their elementary teachers. For… Continue Reading