There is a growing consensus that teacher evaluation in the United States is fundamentally broken. Few would argue that a system that tells 98 percent of teachers they are "satisfactory" benefits anyone--including teachers. The nation's collective failure to invest in high-quality professional feedback to teachers is inconsistent with…

Research has long been clear that teachers matter more to student learning than any other in-school factor. Improving the quality of teaching is critical to student success. Yet only recently have many states and districts begun to take seriously the importance of evaluating teacher performance and providing teachers with the feedback they need to…

The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, a standardized protocol for observation of social and communicative behavior associated with autism, is described. Data on interrater reliability as well as test-retest reliability and discriminant validity are provided. (Author/DB)

The Behaviors of Eating and Activity for Children's Health Evaluation System (BEACHES) codes direct observations of children's dietary and physical activity behaviors and associated environmental events, including physical location, antecedents, and consequences. The system's reliability and validity was assessed in a study of 42 children (ages…

Quality measures were originally developed for research aimed at describing the settings that children spend time in and identifying the characteristics of these environments that contribute to children's development. They were also developed to guide improvements in practice. Increasingly, however, measures of quality are being used for further…

This handbook has been prepared to address one specific problem: How can the techniques of program evaluation be effectively applied to produce useful information about the operations and impact of moral education programs in secondary schools? The handbook is divided into five chapters. The introductory chapter describes the background and…

The document is comprised of the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation (ELLCO) Toolkit, a field-tested observation packet to examine literacy and language practices and materials in prekindergarten through third grade classrooms, and a user's guide providing technical information and instructions for administration and scoring the…