A Look at the University of Wisconsin's Value Added Research Center:

Todd Finkelmeyer:

Rob Meyer can't help but get excited when he hears President Barack Obama talking about the need for states to start measuring whether their teachers, schools and districts are doing enough to help students succeed.

"What he's talking about is what we are doing," says Meyer, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Value-Added Research Center.

If states hope to secure a piece of Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" stimulus money, they'll have to commit to using research data to evaluate student progress and the effectiveness of teachers, schools and districts.

Crunching numbers and producing statistical models that measure these things is what Meyer and his staff of 50 educators, researchers and various stakeholders do at the Value-Added Research Center, which was founded in 2004. These so-called "value-added" models of evaluation are designed to measure the contributions teachers and schools make to student academic growth. This method not only looks at standardized test results, but also uses statistical models to take into account a range of factors that might affect scores - including a student's race, English language ability, family income and parental education level.

"What the value-added model is designed to do is measure the effect and contribution of the educational unit on a student, whether it's a classroom, a team of teachers, a school or a program," says Meyer. Most other evaluation systems currently in use simply hold schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.

Much more on "value added assessment" here, along with the oft-criticized WKCE test, the soft foundation of much of this local work.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 10, 2009 3:36 PM
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