Skip to main content
  • About Us
  • Careers
  • Contact

Search form

American Institutes for Research

  • Our Work
    • Education
    • Health
    • International
    • Workforce
    • ALL TOPICS >
  • Our Services
    • Research and Evaluation
    • Technical Assistance
  • Our Experts
  • News & Events

You are here

  • Home
24 Aug 2013
Report

Determining Attribution: Holding Teachers Accountable for Student Growth

Hella Bel Hadj Amor, Natalie Tucker, and Umut Özek

New state and federal policies, such as the Race to the Top program, have redefined accountability to require that states develop and use performance-based teacher evaluation systems to inform decisions on professional development, employment, and compensation. If teacher performance focuses on student test scores, states and districts must have a mechanism for linking those test scores to the teachers who taught those students.

This paper summarizes key issues that states and districts implementing growth and value-added models for teacher evaluation may wish to consider, along with practical examples of options for implementation. It also focuses on issues related to linking students to teachers, a concept commonly referred to as attribution.

The authors make the following conclusions:

  • There are several considerations within a set of attribution rules; these may include accounting for how much time a student spent in a teacher’s class, how many relevant courses a student had, and how to define teacher of record.
  • Rules for attribution can vary, depending on whether a student had one or many teachers of record in a given year.
  • In practice, there are a number of ways to measure refined student-teacher data linkages, depending on what information is available or can be collected through existing or new data systems.
PDF icon Determining Attribution: Holding Teachers Accountable for Student Growth (Summary)
PDF icon Determining Attribution: Holding Teachers Accountable for Student Growth

Further Reading

  • Value-Added Measures in Education
  • Misattribution of Teacher Value-Added
  • Considerations Regarding Release of Individual Teacher Value-Added Scores
  • Estimating Teacher Contributions to Student Learning: The Role of the School Component
  • AIR Experts Participate in Association for Education Finance and Policy’s Annual Conference
Share

Topic

Education
Teacher Preparation and Performance

RESEARCH. EVALUATION. APPLICATION. IMPACT.

About Us

About AIR
Board of Directors
Leadership
Experts
Clients
Contracting with AIR
Contact Us

Our Work

Education
Health
International
Workforce

Client Services

Research and Evaluation
Technical Assistance

News & Events

Careers at AIR


Search form


 

Connecting

FacebookTwitterLinkedinYouTubeInstagram

American Institutes for Research

1400 Crystal Drive, 10th Floor
Arlington, VA 22202-3289
Call: (202) 403-5000
Fax: (202) 403-5000

Copyright © 2021 American Institutes for Research®.  All rights reserved.

  • Privacy Policy
  • Sitemap