Just Released: The American Education Research Association’s (AERA) Statement on VAMs
Yesterday, the Council of the American Education Research Association (AERA) – AERA, founded in 1916, is the largest national professional organization devoted to the scientific study of education – publicly released their “AERA Statement on Use of Value-Added Models (VAM) for the Evaluation of Educators and Educator Preparation Programs.” Below is a summary of the AERA Council’s key points, noting for transparency that I contributed to these points in June of 2014, before the final statement was externally reviewed, revised, and vetted for public release.
As per the introduction: “The purpose of this statement is to inform those using or considering the use of value-added models (VAM) about their scientific and technical limitations in the evaluation of educators [as well as programs that prepare teachers].” The purpose of this statement is also to stress “the importance of any educator evaluation system meeting the highest standards of practice in statistics and measurement,” well before VAM output are to carry any “high-stakes, dispositive weight in [such teacher or other] evaluations” ( p. 1).
As per the main body of the statement, the AERA Council highlights eight very importanttechnical requirements that must be met prior to such evaluative use. These eight technical requirements should be officially recognized by all states, and/or used by any of you out there to help inform your states regarding what they can and cannot, or should and should not do when using VAMs, whereas “[a]ny material departure from these [eight] Just Released: The American Education Research Association’s (AERA) Statement on VAMs | VAMboozled!: