Helping students formulate career goals and prepare for successful careers continues to be an important educational objective pursued by many high schools. This report examines the challenges faced by a recent cohort of high school students as they sought to define and achieve their goals, the...

This paper investigates the extent to which variables describing the classroom behavior of teachers and variables describing teachers' backgrounds and training explain differences in the effectiveness of teachers in improving the vocabulary skills of inner-city black children in four elementary...

Some educators are concerned that students with test scores at the bottom or top of the test score distribution will negatively affect the value-added estimates of teachers of those students.

Examines work-based learning activities in high school, noting that a diverse mix of students—including both high- and low-achievers—participates in some work-based activity. However, females are more likely to do so than males. Also notes that internships arranged through school...

This article addresses likely error rates for measuring teacher and school performance in the upper elementary grades using value-added models applied to student test score gain data. Using formulas based on ordinary least squares and empirical Bayes estimators, error rates for comparing a...

In the first rigorous study of the impacts of Expeditionary Learning (EL) model schools, Mathematica found that EL middle school students perform better in reading and math than their counterparts in other public schools.

This report details second-year results from Mathematica’s study on Chicago Public Schools’ Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), a Teacher Incentive Fund grantee. The TAP model offers teachers performance pay, professional development, and advancement opportunities based in part on...

This working paper outlines four options available to policymakers for addressing co-teaching in a value-added model: the partial credit method, the teacher team method, the full roster method, and the full roster-plus method. The authors discuss why the first two methods are impractical, and...