Instructional coaching, informed by observation tools that measure teachers' practices, has been effective in improving teaching quality in early learning programs. However, existing measurement tools limit teachers' abilities to implement this type of instructional coaching at scale. To address this challenge, a team at SRI Education, along with…

The Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) instrument provides insight for instructors and administrators alike, often touting high response-rates to endorse their validity and reliability. However, response-rate alone omits consideration for "adequate quantity of 'observational sampling opportunity' (OSO) data points" (e.g., high student…

Although the first research on the creative process was based on interviews with the aim of identifying the main stages (macro-process), in the last 50 years researchers have focused more on the analysis of micro-processes, i.e., the mechanisms underlying the generation of ideas. This interest in the micro-processes is partly a result of the tools…

The Social and Emotional Learning Program Quality Assessment (SEL PQA) is an efficient and effective, research-validated observational tool for assessing adult youth leader practices that support social and emotional learning. Intended to be used for programs serving young people in grades K-12, the instrument builds on the research-validated…

Researchers and policymakers in the US and beyond increasingly seek to identify teaching qualities that are associated with academic achievement gains for K-12 students through effectiveness studies. Yet teaching quality varies with academic content and social contexts, involves multiple participants, and requires a range of skills, knowledge, and…

The purpose of this Professional Pathways for Teachers (PPfT) evaluation was to examine the measurement validity and reliability of PPfT appraisal data from the 2017-2018 school year in the Austin Independent School District. The PPfT appraisal is a multi-measure system that covers three areas: instructional practices (IP), professional growth and…

Injuries may occur more often in physical education due to the nature of the activities taught. Because of this, the issue of negligence is an important concern. Risk management is one method physical educators use to decrease the occurrence of injuries and negligence. The purpose of this article is to introduce a Risk Management Inventory that…

In this webinar, Dr. Drew Gitomer, professor at Rutgers University, shared results from recent studies of classroom observations that helped participants understand both general findings about the qualities of classroom interactions and also the challenges to carrying out valid and reliable observations. This Q&A addressed the questions…

The authors describe the development and initial validation of a home-based version of the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Lab-TAB), which was designed to assess childhood temperament with a comprehensive series of emotion-eliciting behavioral episodes. This article provides researchers with general guidelines for assessing specific…

During a sequence of tutorials conducted by the first author, it became evident that students were not seeing how to apply the theorem concerning a continuous function on a closed and bounded interval attaining its extreme values in situations in which it is necessary first to construct the closed and bounded interval by reasoning about properties…

Injured children (N=145 between 2 and 13 years of age) were recruited from a hospital emergency room and were interviewed about the injury event soon afterward and then twice more at yearly intervals. Their transcripts were coded three ways: completeness of overall structural components of a prototypical injury event (e.g., who, when, where),…

Recent articles in "The Journal for Specialists in Group Work" have discussed credibility indicators for quantitative and qualitative studies (Asner-Self, 2009; Rubel & Villalba, 2009). This article extends upon these contributions by discussing measurement issues that are relevant to producers and consumers of quantitative group research. This…

In Shadish (2010) and West and Thoemmes (2010), the authors contrasted 2 approaches to causality. The first originated in the psychology literature and is associated with work by Campbell (e.g., Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002), and the second has its roots in the statistics literature and is associated with work by Rubin (e.g., Rubin, 2006). In…

This article develops a validity argument approach for use on observation protocols currently used to assess teacher quality for high-stakes personnel and professional development decisions. After defining the teaching quality domain, we articulate an interpretive argument for observation protocols. To illustrate the types of evidence that might…

Effective teaching has long been an issue of national concern, but in recent years focus on the effectiveness of programs to produce high-quality teachers has sharpened. Long-standing achievement gaps persist despite large-scale legislative changes at the federal and state levels, and American students continue to show poorer performance on…