I'm a governor of a big FE college, which means I need to keep an eye on issues like value added measures of teachers' or institutions' performance.
Five items have recently caught my attention and I thought that gathered into one place they might be useful to others. [I'll consider adding more if you send them to me.]
The first two are brief rebuttals of work funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [PDF] that purports to show that there is year-to-year consistency in the "value" that individual teachers add to learners.
The third is a classy more general piece about the instability of value-added estimates, from the Albert Shanker Institute. The fourth is a recently published article by Schafer and colleagues which challenges commonly held assumptions about value added. Finally there is a short video by the research psychologist Daniel Willingham (yes, the Daniel Willingham cited by Michael Gove in his speech in praise of tests in November 2012 - on which Willingham was himself moved to comment), which summarises the problem with value added in a particularly accessible way.
- Gates Foundation Wastes More Money Pushing VAM - by Gene V Glass, Research Professor & Senior Researcher in the School of Education and National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado
- The 50 Million Dollar Lie - by New York school teacher Gary Rubinstein
- A Few Points About The Instability Of Value-Added Estimates - by Matthew di Carlo
- Evaluating Teachers and Schools Using Student Growth Models [PDF] by William D. Schafer, Robert W. Lissitz, Xiaoshu Zhu, Yuan Zhang, Xiaodong Hou and Ying Li
- Merit Pay, Teacher Pay, & Value Added Measures by Daniel Willingham -
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