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ERIC Number: ED558130
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2014-Sep
Pages: 42
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
A Comparison of Growth Percentile and Value-Added Models of Teacher Performance. Working Paper #39
Guarino, Cassandra M.; Reckase, Mark D.; Stacy, Brian W.; Wooldridge, Jeffrey M.
Education Policy Center at Michigan State University
School districts and state departments of education frequently must choose between a variety of methods to estimating teacher quality. This paper examines under what circumstances the decision between estimators of teacher quality is important. We examine estimates derived from student growth percentile measures and estimates derived from commonly used value-added estimators. Using simulated data, we examine how well the estimators can rank teachers and avoid misclassification errors under a variety of assignment scenarios of teachers to students. We find that growth percentile measures perform worse than value-added measures that control for prior year student test scores and include teacher fixed effects when assignment of students to teachers is nonrandom. In addition, using actual data from a large diverse anonymous state, we find evidence that growth percentile measures are less correlated with value-added measures with teacher fixed effects when there is evidence of nonrandom grouping of students in schools. This evidence suggests that the choice between estimators is most consequential under nonrandom assignment of teachers to students, and that value-added measures controlling for teacher fixed effects may be better suited to estimating teacher quality in this case.
Education Policy Center. Michigan State University, 201 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824-1034. Tel: 517-355-4494; Fax: 517-432-6202; e-mail: EPC@msu.edu; Web site: http://education.msu.edu/epc
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Institute of Education Sciences (ED)
Authoring Institution: Michigan State University, Education Policy Center
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305D100028; R305B090011
IES Cited: ED563445