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Value-Added Assessment

Aligning the System: The Case for Linking Teacher Pay to Student Learning
Ed Week ( March 29, 2006 )
Summary: If America is to remain a stable, middle-class society, our public schools must be transformed. In today's fiercely competitive global economy, where high wages demand advanced education and skills, the salaries of our teachers can no longer be paid without regard to results in student learning. This disconnect between means and ends no longer serves our teachers, our students, or our nation.

Value-added Assessment and Systemic Reform: A Response to America's Human Capital Development Challenge
Aspen Institute (Feb. 2005)
Summary: A paper prepared for Theodore Hershberg's presentation on "Value-added Assessment and Accountability," the Opening Session of the Aspen Institute's Congressional Institute The Challenge of Education Reform: Standards, Accountability, Resources and Policy in Cancun , Mexico February 22-27, 2005 .

Value-Added Assessment: Powerful Diagnostics to Improve Instruction and Promote Student Achievement
AASA Conference Proceedings (2005)
Summary: A paper by Theodore Hershberg prepared for the Leadership on the Line Conference of the American Association of School Administrators on November 4, 2004 in McLean , VA.

Value-Added Modeling: What Does Due Diligence Require?
Educational Testing Service ( December 20,2004 )
Summary: This paper provides a brief introduction to value added models (VAM's) and an analysis of seven key assumptions that underlie the use of VAM's for teacher evaluation. In particular it evaluates the reasonableness of those assumptions and reviews what is known about the sensitivity of the results to departures from those assumptions. The paper ends with a brief description of some of the research projects related to VAM currently underway at ETS.

Value-Added Models and Adequate Yearly Progress: Combining Growth and Adequacy in a Standards-Based Environment
Harold C. Doran
Summary: This paper presents a value-added model that can fit given many of the data elements maintained by a school district or state education agency and a new AYP model, referred to as the Rate of Expected Academic Change, or REACH score.

Value-Added Assessment Special Issue
Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics , Volume 29 No 1, Spring 2004
Summary: This volume has several articles related to Value-Added Assessments

The Revelations of Value-Added
The School Administrator (December 2004)
Summary: Written by Theodore Hershberg, Virginia Adams Simon and Barbara Lea-Kruger, this article explains the diagnostic benefits of value-added assessment and how it complements Adequate Yearly Progress measures and helps schools meet their NCLB targets.

Measuring What Matters: How value-added assessment can be used to drive learning gains
American School Boards Journal (February, 2004)
Summary: An article by Theodore Hershberg, Virginia Adams Simon and Barbara Lea-Kruger that explains value-added assessment and how it can be used as a powerful diagnostic tool for improving student performance.

Sizing Up Test Scores
Dale Ballou (Summer 2002)
Summary: In the past decade researchers have grown interested in ways of measuring and comparing the gains in academic achievement that a school or teacher elicits—in other words, a school or teacher's “value added.”

Review and Analysis of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (part one)
R. Darrel Bock, Richard Wolfe, and Thomas Fisher (1996)
Summary: The results of the evaluation of the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS), contracted last year by the Office of Education Accountability.

A Review and Analysis of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (part two)
Thomas H. Fisher (1996)
Summary: The report focuses on the design and implementation of the Tennessee state testing program that generates the data for TVAAS and the policy implication of TVAAS as it presently is designed and implemented.

Evaluating Value-Added Models for Teacher Accountability
Daniel McCaffrey, J. R. Lockwood, Daniel Koretz, and Laura Hamilton (2004)
Summary: In this monograph, we clarify the primary questions raised by the use of VAM for measuring teacher effects, review the most important recent applications of VAM, and discuss a variety of the most important statistical and measurement issues that might affect the validity of VAM inferences.

Teacher Effects and Teacher Effectiveness: A Validity Investigation of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment
Haggai Kupermintz (2003)
Summary: This article addresses the validity of teacher evaluation measures produced by the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS). The system analyzes the student test score data and estimates the measures of teaching effectiveness. WE describe the process of generating teacher effectiveness estimates in TVAAS and discuss policy implications of using these estimates for accountability purposes.

Using R for Estimating Longitudinal Student Achievement Models
J. R. Lockwood, Harold Doran, and Daniel McCaffrey (2003)
Summary: The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how R, via the lme function for linear mixed effects models in the nlme package, can be used to estimate all of the most common value-added models used in educational research.

A Potential Outcomes View of Value-Added Assessment in Education
Donald B. Rubin, Elizabeth A. Stuart, and Elaine L. Zanutto (November 2003)
Summary: In this paper, the author approaches value-added assessment from a “potential outcomes” point of view, with the goal of clarifying the estimation goals and understanding the limitations of data for the types of comparisons being sought.

Research Progress Report: Cumulative and Residual Effects of Teachers on Future Student Academic Achievement: Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System
William Sanders and June Rivers (November 5, 2002)
Summary:

Effects of Building Change on Indicators of Student Achievement Growth: Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System
William Sanders, Arnold Saxton, John Schneider, John Dearden, Boyd, Paul S. Wright, and Sandra Horn (November 5, 2002)
Summary: Dr. Sanders focuses his article on how developed the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System. Dr. Sanders focuses his article on how the student outcomes assessment has led to identification of a surprising problem associated with students' change of building as well as delineation of hypotheses as to why the problem occurs.

Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement
Eric Hanushek, John Kain, and Steve Rivkin (1998)
Summary: This paper disentangles the separate factors influencing achievement with special attention given to the role of teacher differences and other aspects of schools.

The Impact of Individual Teachers and Peers on Individual Student Achievement
John Kain (October 31, 1998)
Summary: This paper is concerned with the impact of classroom teachers and peers on individual student achievement.

Research Findings from the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) Database: Implications for Educational Evaluation and Research
William Sanders and Sandra Horn (1998)
Summary: Teacher effects on student achievement have been found to be both additive and cumulative with little evidence that subsequent effective teachers can offset the effects of ineffective ones.

Assessment of the Statistical Methodology Used in the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System
Walter Stroup (1995)
Summary: A review of the statistical methodology used at the Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center in Knoxville , Tennessee .