Valid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of fourth- and fifth-grade English language arts classes, we apply novel text-as-data methods to develop automated measures of teaching to complement classroom observations…

Valid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers, but conventional classroom observations are costly, prone to rater bias, and hard to implement at scale. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th-grade English language arts classes, we apply novel…

The study set out to discover what characterizes the meaningful learning of mathematics among low-achieving students (LAS) and to highlight the challenges their characteristics pose for scaffolding, in particular for its adaptive core: contingent teaching. The setting was an extracurricular program for teaching meaningful mathematics to LAS…

Nonrandom assignment of students to teachers can bias value-added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008, 2010) shows that typical value-added models indicate large counterfactual effects of fifth-grade teachers on students' fourth-grade learning, indicating that classroom assignments are far from random. This article quantifies…