Ben Gillett's List: EdL 605 Paper

• • Conc - Value added measures are good, but they need to be part of something larger

• • LA Times Article - prediction vs reality = value added

• • Looks at VAE and disagrees - asks if testing is a valid/accurate measure. 
• Question 3: Do standardized tests assess what matters most about teaching and learning? If not, then no value-added approach based on those tests makes any sense.

• • VAM - there is a point, but it should be only one measure = impricise

• • RAND Report - Add multiple measures - use multiple years -  proceed w/ caution
    

• • Preliminary Report by MSU VAM - Are they accurate? It doesn't look like they totally are.

• • Economic Policy Institute - To much reliance on test scores is bad.

• an be argued that the most important contributing factor is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. Evaluating teacher quality is complicated, yet it has become even more important with the
• Teacher test scores are inconsistently associated with teacher value-added.
•  Value-added modeling for accountability, or VAM-A, identifies the effectiveness of each individual teacher as measured by student achievement on standardized test scores
• Value-added varies considerably across teachers.
       2. Teacher value-added positively correlates with other measures of teacher effectiveness, especially structured and unstructured principal evaluations.
       These first two findings are good news for VAM-A but, as Harris argues, there is also some bad news:
       3. Teacher value-added scores are imprecise.
       4. Individual teacher value-added changes considerably over time. This "instability" in the measures is a problem because there is no reason to believe that actual teacher effectiveness varies as much as the measures sometimes indicate.
       Overall, Harris concludes that there are clear advantages and disadvantages to using accountability measures versus credentials. Although VAM-P yields fairly precise estimates of the effects of teacher credentials, these effects are small, and they explain little of the total variation value-added. In contrast, the VAM-A measures are imprecise, but they imprecisely measure what is of greatest interest. Also, to the degree that student test scores can and should be used to evaluate teachers, VAM-A is better than the alternative

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