Teachers make a difference in student academic growth. Students from low-income, minority communities attend schools with less resources and less qualified teachers than students in wealthier communities. The Race to the Top (RTTT) policy by the U.S. Department of Education has attempted to address the achievement gap based on SES and the disparity in the quality of teachers between communities. The policy stipulates that teacher effectiveness be determined, in significant part, by student growth measures and supplemented with multiple observation-based assessments. The emphasis placed on student outcomes to indicate teacher effects has served to link teacher evaluations with teacher effectiveness. This review article examines the reported benefits and critical responses to the use of a prominent student growth measure, the Education ValueAdded Assessment System (EVAAS), in terms of its implementation as an evaluation tool of teacher effectiveness in low-income, minority schools. Models of observational teacher evaluations, taking into consideration common attributes of effective teachers in low-income schools, are presented as supplemental measures to provide more in-depth information to interpret value-added analyses and to minimize possible misinterpretation of student growth data or the misclassification of teachers' effectiveness for teachers in low-income schools. Information obtained from a combination of evaluation measures can be used to identify both effective and ineffective teachers, to target areas in need of improvement to increase teacher effectiveness, and to make decisions concerning the equitable distribution of effective teachers, especially for students who are most in need.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and recent efforts in STEM education have highlighted a multi-disciplinary vision of teachers’ integrating science education and engineering design problem-solving for student learning and critical thinking development. However, elementary pre-service teachers (PSTs) typically are unfamiliar with engineering design. Since research is limited on elementary PSTs’ ability to notice student thinking for engineering problem-solving, the purpose of this exploratory study was to identify patterns in PSTs’ written reflections from their fourth-grade practicum teaching experience with an integrated science/engineering STEM unit. We adapted Barnhart and van Es’s (2015) teacher noticing coding scheme to examine PSTs’ level of focus (low, basic, or strong) in their professional noticing (attending, analyzing, and responding) of students’ thinking and engineering disciplinary core ideas. The results indicated that PSTs’ reflections focused more on attending to students’ engineering ideas than on analyzing and responding to students’ thinking. For NGSS engineering disciplinary core ideas, the PSTs reflected the least on defining and delimiting the engineering problem, focusing more on students’ idea generation to solve the problem and students’ thinking to optimize their design with less emphasis on evaluating design ideas. These findings suggest possible areas of emphasis for teacher educators to prepare elementary PSTs in developing their ability to attend to, analyze, and respond to students’ engineering thinking when integrating engineering design with science education.
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