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Student feedback, test-score growth calculations, and observations of practice appear to pick up different but complementary information that, combined, can provide a balanced and accurate picture of teacher performance, according to research recently released from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
A composite measure on teacher effectiveness drawing on all three of those measures, and tested through a random-assignment experiment, closely predicted how much a high-performing group of teachers would successfully boost their students' standardized-test scores, concludes the series of new papers, part of the massive Measures of Effective Teaching study launched more than three years ago.
"If you select the right measures, you can provide teachers with an honest assessment of where they stand in their practice that, hopefully, will serve as the launching point for their development," said Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who headed the study.
Basing more than half a teacher's evaluation on test-score-based measures of student achievement seemed to compromise it, the researchers also found.
Another piece suggests that teachers should be observed by more than one person to ensure that scores are reliable.
The findings, released Jan. 8, are among dozens from the final work products of MET. Together, they are billed as a proof point for the three measures the foundation has spent years studying.
Even as they praised the project's other insights, some scholars debated the strength of the findings from the random experiment. One glitch: Teachers and administrators didn't always comply with the randomization, making it harder to interpret the results.
"We can only be certain that it's a valid predictor of future test scores for those teachers who complied with the assignments," said Jonah E. Rockoff, an associate professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, who has studied teacher-quality issues using economic techniques. Mr. Rockoff was not involved in the study, but reviewed early drafts of the findings.
Taken as a whole, the final MET findings provide much food for thought about how teacher evaluations might best be structured. But they are not likely to end a contentious, noisy debate about evaluation systems, and they are almost certain to be intensely scrutinized, in part because of Gates' separate support for advocacy organizations...