Purpose: Singapore is a country with low teacher attrition rates and high performance on international assessments (TIMSS 2011/2015 and PISA 2012/2015). Consequently, its education system is often considered as a model for other nations. The purpose of this paper is to extend research on teacher job satisfaction in Singapore and provide…

Value-added models are considered one of the best alternatives not only for accountability purposes but also to improve the school system itself. The estimates provided by these models measure the contribution of schools to students' academic progress, once the effect of other factors outside school control are eliminated. The functional form for…

This research empirically evaluates data sets from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for design effects of ignoring the sampling design in weighted two-level analyses. Currently, researchers may ignore the sampling design beyond the levels that they model which might result in incorrect inferences regarding hypotheses due to…

This study investigates: (1) how principals' data-driven practices may vary by principals' and school backgrounds and how that changes over time; (2) how principals' data-driven practices influence teacher buy-in; and (3) how principals' data-driven practices and teachers' buy-in influence student outcomes. This study uses data from the Study of…

It is often difficult and costly to obtain individual-level student achievement data, yet, researchers are frequently reluctant to use school-level achievement data that are widely available from state websites. We argue that public-use aggregate school-level achievement data are, in fact, sufficient to address a wide range of evaluation questions…

Measures of classroom and school environments are a central component of policy efforts that assess school and teacher quality. These measures are often formed by aggregating individual survey responses to form group-level measures, and assume an invariant measurement model holds at both the individual and group level. This paper explores the…

This Methodological Brief gives an overview of statistical methods used to gauge academic growth and discusses issues surrounding the measurement of growth in gifted populations. To illustrate some of these issues, we describe a growth model that examines differences in summer lag between gifted and nongifted students. We also provide…

Intervention studies in school systems are sometimes aimed not at changing curriculum or classroom technique, but rather at changing the way that teachers, teaching coaches, and administrators in schools work with one another--in short, changing the professional social networks of educators. Current methods of social network analysis are…

In traditional studies on value-added indicators of educational effectiveness, students are usually treated as belonging to those schools where they took their final examination. However, in practice, students sometimes attend multiple schools and therefore it is questionable whether this assumption of belonging to the last school they attended…

A district-level reform model created by the Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE) provided consultation with district leaders on strategic use of data and selection of proven programs. Fifty-nine districts in seven states were randomly assigned to CDDRE or control conditions. A total of 397 elementary and 225 middle schools were…

In the context of a national conversation about exclusionary discipline, we conducted a multilevel examination of the relative contributions of infraction, student, and school characteristics to rates of and racial disparities in out-of-school suspension and expulsion. Type of infraction; race, gender, and to a certain extent socioeconomic status…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between student mathematics performance of 4th, 8th, and 11th grade students in Nebraska and the mode of test administration, online and paper-pencil. Schools were allowed to select the mode of test administration for their school with some exceptions for students needing…

This paper reports on secondary analysis of TIMSS 2003 data, based on a sound conceptual model, aiming to explain differential science achievement in South Africa from the perspective of educational effectiveness research. The conceptual framework was developed by refining existing school effectiveness models and including factors related to…