This article considers potential impediments to the estimation of teacher quality caused primarily by the purposeful behavior of families, administrators, and teachers. The discussion highlights the benefits of accounting for student and school differences through a value-added modeling approach...

Value-added indicators are now a central part of school accountability in England, and value-added information is routinely used in school improvement at both the national and the local levels. This article describes the value-added models that are being used in the academic year 2007–8 by...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the sensitivity of growth and value-added modeling to the way an underlying vertical score scale has been created. Longitudinal item-level data were analyzed with both student- and school-level identifiers for the entire state of Colorado between 2003...

Value-added modeling continues to gain traction as a tool for measuring teacher performance. However, recent research questions the validity of the value-added approach by showing that it does not mitigate student-teacher sorting bias (its presumed primary benefit). Our study explores this...

Concepts of new school governance did considerably change the role and responsibilities of school principals. Due to the shift in their role from administrator to manager, recent research tends to focus on management activity, but little is still known about the interrelation between changing...

Most studies find little to no effect of classroom computers on student achievement. We suggest that this null effect may combine positive effects of computer uses without equivalently effective alternative traditional teaching practices and negative effects of uses that substitute more...

We study the origins of what has become one of the most radical and encompassing programmes of school reform seen in the recent past amongst advanced countries - the introduction of academy schools to English secondary education. Academies are state schools that are allowed to run in an...

Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert Selbstüberschätzungseffekte im deutschen Schulwesen. Zu diesem Zweck wurde eine Umfrage unter Oberstufenschülern eines Gymnasiums in Nordrhein-Westfalen durchgeführt. Die Schüler wurden u. a. nach ihrem aktuellen Notenschnitt und der angestrebten...

This paper presents the result of a field experiment on the effectiveness of non-monetary incentives on pupils' achievement on a mathematical multiple choice test. Our sample consists of 2113 pupils of deprived and high-achieving secondary schools in Germany. Based on a pre-study, we compare the...

We study the effect of standardized external tests on students' academic outcomes. We exploit the fact that only one of the 17 Spanish regions started doing and publishing the results of standardized tests in 2005 and apply a difference-in-difference methodology using outcomes of the PISA study...