Purpose: Performance evaluation informs professional development and helps school personnel improve student learning. Although psychometric literature indicates that a rational, sound, and coherent standard-setting process adds to the credibility of an assessment, few studies have empirically examined the decision-making process. This article…

Initiatives to increase leadership accountability coupled with efforts to promote data-driven leadership have led to widespread adoption of instruments to assess school leaders. In this article, we present a decision matrix that practitioners and researchers can use to facilitate instrument selection. Our decision matrix focuses on the…

The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education is a 360 assessment of principals' learning-centered leadership behaviors. The instrument was designed to provide formative and summative assessment to principals on the leadership behaviors most important to student learning. The purpose of this report is to describe the standard-setting…

Research has consistently shown that principal leadership matters for successful schools. Evaluating principals on the behaviors shown to improve student learning should be an important leverage point for raising leadership quality. Yet principals are often evaluated with the use of instruments with no theoretical background and little, if any,…

The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education is a 360-degree assessment of the effectiveness of principals' learning-centered leadership behaviors. In this report, we present results from a differential item functioning (DIF) study of the assessment. Using data from a national field trial, we searched for evidence of DIF on school level,…

Effective school leadership is key to students' academic success. But the development of effective school leadership has been seriously hampered by the lack of technically sound tools to assess and monitor leaders' performance. This article presents the research base and conceptual framework for a leadership assessment instrument under…

Effective school leadership is key to students' academic success. But the development of effective school leadership has been seriously hampered by the lack of technically sound tools to assess and monitor leaders' performance. With support from The Wallace Foundation, a team from Vanderbilt has been developing such an assessment system, and this…

The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) is a multirater assessment of principals' learning-centered leadership. The instrument was developed based on the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. In this article, we report on the validity and reliability evidence for the VAL-ED accumulated in a national field…

In this article we present results of a comprehensive review of principal leadership assessment practices in the United States. Our analyses of both the general content and the usage of 65 instruments, 56 at the district level and 9 at the state level, provided an in-depth look at what and how districts and states evaluate principals. Using the…