Consumer Alert: Researchers in New Study Find “Surprisingly Weak” Correlations among VAMs and Other Teacher Quality Indicators |

Consumer Alert: Researchers in New Study Find “Surprisingly Weak” Correlations among VAMs and Other Teacher Quality Indicators |:



Consumer Alert: Researchers in New Study Find “Surprisingly Weak” Correlations among VAMs and Other Teacher Quality Indicators

Two weeks ago, an article in the U.S. News and World Report (as well as similar articles in Education Week and linked to from the homepage of the American Educational Research Association [AERA]) highlighted the results of a recent research conducted by University of Southern California’s Morgan Polikoff and University of Pennsylvania’sAndrew Porter. The research article was released online here, in the AERA-based, peer-reviewed, and highly esteemed journal: Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

As per the study’s abstract, the researchers found (to which their peer-reviewers apparently agreed) that the extent to which teachers’ instructional alignment was associated with their contributions to student learning and their effectiveness on VAMs, using data from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, were “surprisingly weak,” or as per the aforementioned U.S. News and World Report article, “weak to nonexistent.”

Researchers, specifically, analyzed the (co)relationships among VAM estimates and observational data, student survey data, and other data pertaining to whether teachers aligned their instruction with state standards. They did this using data taken from 327 fourth and eighth grade math and English teachers in six school districts, again as derived Consumer Alert: Researchers in New Study Find “Surprisingly Weak” Correlations among VAMs and Other Teacher Quality Indicators |: