Getting Teacher Assessment Right: What Policymakers Can Learn from Research

Policy Brief - Dec 07, 2010

Author(s) - Patricia H. Hinchey, Penn State University

This policy brief outlines authoritative research documenting a wide range of useful criteria that should be used together to form the foundation for high quality assessment of teacher quality and effectiveness. These criteria include: classroom observations and evaluations, portfolios prepared by teachers, peer review and value-added models based on student standardized testing. The brief cautions against relying solely or in large part on student test scores for teacher assessment as they are unreliable and encourages policymakers to adopt assessment systems that rely on multiple sources of information.