Henry Braun - Böcker

Value-added methods refer to efforts to estimate the relative contributions of specific teachers, schools, or programs to student test performance. In recent years, these methods have attracted considerable attention because of their potential applicability for educational accountability, teacher pay-for-performance systems, school and teacher improvement, program evaluation, and research. Value-added methods involve complex statistical models applied to test data of varying quality. Accordingly, there are many technical challenges to ascertaining the degree to which the output of these models provides the desired estimates. Despite a substantial amount of research over the last decade and a half, overcoming these challenges has proven to be very difficult, and many questions remain unanswered--at a time when there is strong interest in implementing value-added models in a variety of settings.The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education held a workshop, summarized in this volume, to help identify areas of emerging consensus and areas of disagreement regarding appropriate uses of value-added methods, in an effort to provide research-based guidance to policy makers who are facing decisions about whether to proceed in this direction.

Under pressure and support from the federal government, states have increasingly turned to indicators based on student test scores to evaluate teachers and schools, as well as students themselves. The focus thus far has been on test scores in those subject areas where there is a sequence of consecutive tests, such as in mathematics or English/language arts with a focus on grades 4-8. Teachers in these subject areas, however, constitute less than thirty percent of the teacher workforce in a district. Comparatively little has been written about the measurement of achievement in the other grades and subjects. This volume seeks to remedy this imbalance by focusing on the assessment of student achievement in a broad range of grade levels and subject areas, with particular attention to their use in the evaluation of teachers and schools in all. It addresses traditional end-of-course tests, as well as alternative measures such as portfolios, exhibitions, and student learning objectives. In each case, issues related to design and development, psychometric considerations, and validity challenges are covered from both a generic and a content-specific perspective.The NCME Applications of Educational Measurement and Assessment series includes edited volumes designed to inform research-based applications of educational measurement and assessment. Edited by leading experts, these books are comprehensive and practical resources on the latest developments in the field.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Under pressure and support from the federal government, states have increasingly turned to indicators based on student test scores to evaluate teachers and schools, as well as students themselves. The focus thus far has been on test scores in those subject areas where there is a sequence of consecutive tests, such as in mathematics or English/language arts with a focus on grades 4-8. Teachers in these subject areas, however, constitute less than thirty percent of the teacher workforce in a district. Comparatively little has been written about the measurement of achievement in the other grades and subjects. This volume seeks to remedy this imbalance by focusing on the assessment of student achievement in a broad range of grade levels and subject areas, with particular attention to their use in the evaluation of teachers and schools in all. It addresses traditional end-of-course tests, as well as alternative measures such as portfolios, exhibitions, and student learning objectives. In each case, issues related to design and development, psychometric considerations, and validity challenges are covered from both a generic and a content-specific perspective.The NCME Applications of Educational Measurement and Assessment series includes edited volumes designed to inform research-based applications of educational measurement and assessment. Edited by leading experts, these books are comprehensive and practical resources on the latest developments in the field.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Although the solar energy industry has experienced rapid growth recently, high-level management of photovoltaic (PV) arrays has remained an open problem. Table of Contents: Introduction / Overview of Photovoltaics / Causes Performance Degradation and Outage / Fault Detection Methods / Array Topology Optimization / Monitoring of PV Systems / Summary

In this book, we introduce reconstruction-free compressive vision, where image processing and computer vision algorithms are embedded directly in the compressive domain, without the need for first reconstructing the measurements into images or video.

Consequently, understanding the dynamics governing the distribution and transmission of opportunity – and transforming this understanding into policies and programs – is critical for not only the life outcomes of individual Americans and their children, but also the country as a whole.

Consequently, understanding the dynamics governing the distribution and transmission of opportunity – and transforming this understanding into policies and programs – is critical for not only the life outcomes of individual Americans and their children, but also the country as a whole.