Trending Topic Research File
Over the past decade, the use of value鈥恆dded models (VAM) in teacher and administrator evaluation has grown nationally, while becoming one of education’s most controversial issues. Research evidence on the reliability and validity of VAM, and the consequences of using such indicators in educator evaluation, is still accumulating. In recent years, 91涩漫’s journals have examined many aspects of VAM.
The following compendium of open-access articles are inclusive of all substantive 91涩漫 journal content regarding VAM published since 2009. This page will be updated as new articles are published.
Note: Articles are listed below in reverse chronological order of publication.
George Leckie, Richard Parker, Harvey Goldstein, Kate Tilling Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, November 2023 Researchers argue that further insights may be gained by additionally studying the variance in this quantity in each school. These include the ability to identify both individual schools and school types that exhibit unusually high or low variability in student achievement, even after accounting for differences in student intakes.
Tracey Lloyd, Jared N. Schachner American Educational Research Journal, August 2020 Researchers found that school effects (encompassing both teaching- and nonteaching-related factors) are initially smaller but nearly as stable and perhaps more persistent than are individual teacher effects.
Allison Atteberry, Daniel Mangan Educational Researcher, May 2020 Researchers revisited and extended Papay’s analyses in another Grade 3–8 setting and found similarly low correlations that persist across value-added specifications.
Mark A. Paige, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley Educational Researcher, May 2020 The authors discussed Houston Federation of Teachers v. Houston Independent School District and its potential impact, limitations, and significance.
Eric Parsons, Cory Koedel, Li Tan Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, October 2018 Researchers found that one- and two-step value-added models perform similarly across a wide range of student and teacher sorting conditions, with the two-step model modestly outperforming the one-step model in conditions that best match observed sorting in real data.
Nate Jensen, Andrew Rice, James Soland Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, March 2018 Researchers observed differences in rapid guessing across grades, subjects, and teachers; however, this behavior did not appear to have a substantive effect on teacher value-added estimates.
George Leckie Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, February 2018 Researchers show that fitting a joint value-added multilevel multivariate response model simultaneously to all subjects of cohorts directly gives unbiased estimates of the correlations of interest.
Kimberly C. Everson Review of Educational Reseach, February 2017 Value-added estimates of teacher or school quality are increasingly used for both high- and low-stakes accountability purposes, making understanding of their limitations critical. A review of the recent value-added literature suggests three concerns with the state of the research.
David Blazar, Erika Litke, Johanna Barmore American Educational Research Journal, April 2016 Drawing on data from four urban districts, researchers found that teachers were categorized differently when compared within versus across school districts.
91涩漫 Council Educational Researcher, November 2015 In this official statement, the 91涩漫 advises those using or considering use of value-added models about the scientific and technical limitations of these measures for evaluating educators and programs that prepare teachers. The Use of Teacher Value-Added Measures in Schools: New Evidence, Unanswered Questions, and Future Prospects Douglas N. Harris, Carolyn D. Herrington Educational Researcher, March 2015 In the introduction to a special, VAM-focused issue of Educational Researcher, the special issue's editors pose questions and consider perspectives from labor economics, sociology of organizations, and psychology. The Use of Teacher Value-Added Measures in Schools: New Evidence, Unanswered Questions, and Future Prospects Dale Ballou, Matthew G. Springer Educational Researcher, March 2015 The authors focus on four unappreciated problems in the design and implementation of evaluation systems that incorporate value-added measures. Exploring the Potential of Value-Added Performance Measures to Affect the Quality of the Teacher Workforce Dan D. Goldhaber Educational Researcher, March 2015 This article explores various mechanisms through which the use of value-added might affect teacher quality, describing what researchers know empirically about the potential of each mechanism. Make Room Value Added: Principals’ Human Capital Decisions and the Emergence of Teacher Observation Data Ellen Goldring, Jason A. Grissom, Mollie Rubin, Christine M. Neumerski, Marisa Cannata, Timothy Drake, Patrick Schuermann Educational Researcher, March 2015 The results of this study suggest that the data generated by high-quality observation systems have potential to inform principals' use of data for human capital decisions. Teacher Perspectives on Evaluation Reform: Chicago’s REACH Students Jennie Y. Jiang, Susan E. Sporte, Stuart Luppescu Educational Researcher, March 2015 This study draws on 32 interviews from a random sample of teachers in the Chicago Public Schools and 2 years of survey data from more than 12,000 teachers per year to measure their perceptions of the clarity, practicality, and cost of the district's new teacher evaluation system, finding that teacher perceptions about evaluation are positively correlated with their perceptions of leadership and professional community. Will VAMs Enforce the Walls of the Egg-Crate School? Susan Moore Johnson Educational Researcher, March 2015 Drawing from research about the incentives and norms that influence teachers’ work within schools, this article illustrates the hazards of using VAMs to make job decisions and suggests how VAMs can be used productively as one source of information to promote improvement school-wide. The Value in Value Added Depends on the Ecology Henry Braun Educational Researcher, March 2015 This commentary emphasizes the need to continually revisit the topics treated in the March 2015 issue of Educational Researcher, noting that researchers have much to learn learn about how VAMs are actually used in a variety of settings.
Can Value Added Add Value to Teacher Evaluation? Linda Darling-Hammond Educational Researcher, March 2015 This commentary reflects on the five articles published in Educational Researcher's special issue on VAM in light of other work in this field, offering the author's own thoughts about whether and how VAMs may add value to teacher evaluation. Value Added: A Case Study in the Mismatch Between Education Research and Policy Stephen Raudenbush Educational Researcher, March 2015 This commentary questions a simplistic notion of how policy makers might make effective use of research by sketching how the various levels of the education hierarchy might collaborate, noting that in combination with a wide range of related research and a coherent theory of action, research on teacher effectiveness indicators can increase the potential for educational improvement. Practical Differences Among Aggregate-Level Conditional Status Metrics: From Median Student Growth Percentiles to Value-Added Models Katherine E. Castellano, Andrew D. Ho Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, February 2015 This article provides a framework for aggregate-level conditional status metrics (ACSMs), including value-added models. Morgan S. Polikoff, Andrew C. Porter Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, December 2014 This article is the first to explore the extent to which teachers’ instructional alignment is associated with contributions to student learning and effectiveness on composite evaluation measures.
Pam Grossman, Julia Jackson Cohen, Matthew Ronfeldt, Lindsay Brown Educational Researcher, August/September 2014 This study examined how the relationships between an observational protocol and value-added measures shift when different tests are used to assess student achievement.
Susanna Loeb, James Soland, Lindsay Fox Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2014 This article contributes to research about whether value-added measures are consistent across student subgroups by examining teachers’ value-added measures with English learners to the same teachers’ value-added measures with non-English learners.
Noelle A. Paufler, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley American Educational Research Journal, April 2014 This study’s findings, that overwhelmingly students are not randomly assigned into classrooms, have implications for value-added analyses and the extent to which nonrandom assignment practices might impact teachers’ value-added scores.
Douglas N. Harris, William K. Ingle, Stacey A. Rutledge American Educational Research Journal, February 2014 Quantitative analysis of thirty schools finds that teacher value-added measures and informal principal evaluations are positively, but weakly, correlated.
Andrew T. Karl, Yan Yang, Sharon L. Lohr Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, December 2013 This article examines the concern that ignoring the presence of missing values can bias teachers’ value-added scores.
Marcus A. Winters, Joshua M. Cowen Educational Researcher, August/September 2013 Examining data from the state of Florida and policies that deny or revoke tenure from teachers who receive poor evaluation ratings based on quantitative measures of performance, the authors of this article show that specific policy design determines the extent of the potential for value-added to improve the overall quality of the teaching workforce.
Dan D. Goldhaber, Pete Goldschmidt, Fannie Tseng Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2013 The authors examine the relationship between teacher effect estimates derived from value-added model specifications employing different student learning assumptions.
Nathan D. Jones, Heather M. Buzick, Sultan Turkan Educational Researcher, May 2013 The research examines value-added scores in the context of the challenges of accounting for students with disabilities and English learners.
Peter Z. Schochet, Hanley S. Chiang Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, April 2013 This article addresses likely error rates for measuring teacher and school performance in the upper elementary grades using value-added models applied to student test score gain data, finding results that suggest policymakers must carefully consider likely system error rates when using value-added estimates to make high-stakes decisions regarding educators.
Jennifer Broatch, Sharon L. Lohr Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, April 2012 The authors of this paper develop a multiresponse approach to value-added assessment models that allows responses to be either continuous or categorical, leading to multidimensional estimates of value added by teachers and allowing the correlations among these dimensions to be explored.
Lars Lefgren, David Sims Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, March 2012 This article shows how efficient use of information across subjects can improve the predictive ability of value-added models using data from North Carolina.
Heather C. Hill, Laura Kapitula, Kristin Umland American Educational Research Journal, June 2011 This article uses case studies to illustrate problems in using value-added scores in pay-for-performance plans and also compares 24 middle school mathematics teachers’ value-added scores, finding that scores correlate not only with teachers’ mathematical knowledge and quality of instruction but also with the population of students they teach.
John P. Papay American Educational Research Journal, February 2011 Using data from a large, urban school district, this study examines value-added estimates from three reading achievement tests and finds that test timing and measurement error contribute to the instability of value-added estimates across tests.