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…

This dissertation comprises three papers that propose, discuss, and illustrate models to make improved inferences about research questions regarding student achievement in education. Addressing the types of questions common in educational research today requires three different "extensions" to traditional educational assessment: (1)…

School districts occupy center stage in education reform in the U.S. They manage nearly all public funding and are frequently the locus of federal and state reform initiatives, e.g., instituting meaningful teacher evaluation systems. Financial compensation for district leaders is high, with many being paid more than the chief state school officers…

In this chapter, the authors develop a theory to explain the effects of mentoring and induction activities on new teachers' commitment, instructional quality, and effectiveness, and they describe how utility functions can express variation in these outcomes. Then they explicate the role of three-level models (i.e., with random effects) in…