The mentoring and evaluating process enhances quality of teachers' serving in early childhood programs. The Early Educator Support (EES) Program is a new model of mentoring and coaching that aims to lend support to PreK teachers' working in nonpublic school settings. In this qualitative study, we examined the lived experiences of 12 mentors and…

The validity of the Kappa coefficient of chance-corrected agreement has been questioned when the prevalence of specific rating scale categories is low and agreement between raters is high. The researchers proposed the Lambda Coefficient of Rater-Mediated Agreement as an alternative to Kappa to address these concerns. Lambda corrects for chance…

The current study examines the contribution of racial congruence on young children's speech and language production to determine if African American children produce more or different language with an African American assessor, as opposed to a White assessor. Participants for the current study were selected from a larger group of children…

Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

Argumentation, a key scientific practice presented in the "Framework for K-12 Science Education," requires students to construct and critique arguments, but timely evaluation of arguments in large-scale classrooms is challenging. Recent work has shown the potential of automated scoring systems for open response assessments, leveraging…

In a randomized trial that collects text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require that each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by human raters. An impact analysis can then be conducted to compare treatment and control groups, using the hand-coded scores as a measured outcome. This…

This large-scale study used a survey to collect data on K-12 world language program leadership and instructional practices in Massachusetts public schools, investigating associations between the presence of a program leader or primary evaluator who is a world language specialist and instructional practices, curriculum, and assessment. The study…

Efforts to monitor and improve responsive caregiving for young children, because of its importance for child development, are part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Two brief observational measures of responsive caregiving have been developed and validated (Responsive Interactions for Learning-parent [RIFL-P] and educator…

This study describes the development of a special education teacher observation protocol detailing the elements of effective decoding instruction. The psychometric properties of the protocol were investigated through many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM). Video observations of classroom decoding instruction from 20 special education teachers across…

The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) is a high stakes summative assessment that was designed to measure pre-service teacher readiness. We examined the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of trained PACT evaluators who rated 19 candidates. As measured by Cohen's weighted kappa, the overall IRR estimate was 0.17 (poor strength of…

This cross-case synthesis gives voice to evaluators in EC-12 and higher education settings who are enacting a state-mandated system of teacher evaluation and support by examining their perceptions of the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (T-TESS). Questions addressed included: How do differently situated school administrators and…

Star teachers (Haberman, 1995) maintain high self-efficacy and job satisfaction when working with urban populations (Ford et al. 2020). The purpose of this study was to investigate self-efficacy in regards to urban schools through the criteria of effective urban teachers, or stars. A total of 14 college students majoring in early childhood…

Purpose: The differential diagnosis of developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children represents a unique challenge due to their distributed language exposure and knowledge. The current evidence indicates that dual-language testing yields the most accurate classification of DLD among bilinguals, but there are limited personnel and…

Districts nationwide have increased the frequency of teacher evaluations. Yet, we know little about the role of evaluator feedback for teacher improvement. Using unique classroom observation-level data, we use evaluator ratings and teacher self-assessments of teacher performance to rigorously examine (positive and negative) feedback valence from…