Among community college leaders and others interested in reforms to improve student success, there is growing interest in adopting machine learning (ML) techniques to predict credential completion. However, ML algorithms are often complex and are not readily accessible to practitioners for whom a simpler set of near-term measures may serve as…

Objective: This study examines how accurately a small set of short-term academic indicators can approximate long-term outcomes of community college students so that decision-makers can take informed actions based on those indicators to evaluate the current progress of large-scale reform efforts on long-term outcomes, which in practice will not be…

From 2006 to 2008, Educational Testing Service (ETS) produced a series of reports titled "A Culture of Evidence", designed to capture a changing climate in higher education assessment. A decade later, colleges and universities already face a new set of challenges resulting from societal, technological, and various other influences. ETS…

Stories about the importance of teacher effectiveness for student achievement are currently ubiquitous in the media (Gladwell 2008; Kristoff 2009; Felch et al 2010). Teacher quality is also the focus of significant national efforts and investments. A growing body of quantitative research supports the focus on teacher and teacher effectiveness.…

This article focuses on using dispositions as a gate in the admission process. It describes the rationale, pragmatic considerations, and preliminary findings for using dispositions in the admission process for prospective teachers. Three questions are explored. Should dispositions be used as an admission criterion? Is it reasonable to expect major…

Extensive education research on the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results. First, teacher quality varies substantially as measured by the value added to student achievement or future academic attainment or earnings. Second, variables often used to determine entry into the profession and…

Mounting pressure in the policy arena to improve teacher productivity either by improving signals that predict teacher performance or through creating incentive contracts based on performance--has spurred two related questions: Are there important determinants of teacher productivity that are not captured by teacher credentials but that can be…

Value-added models in education research allow researchers to explore how a wide variety of policies and measured school inputs affect the academic performance of students. Researchers typically quantify the impacts of such interventions in terms of "effect sizes", i.e., the estimated effect of a one standard deviation change in the…