This study examined the impact of the 2+2 Alternative Teacher Performance Appraisal System that has been implemented in Shanxi province in China. A mixed research design was used to evaluate the program. Six high schools and a total of 78 teachers (13 teachers in each school) in Shanxi province were selected. Three of the schools participated in the 2+2 program while another three served as the...

O ver the past 15 years, a growing body of research has demonstrated that teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student achievement. Taking advantage of improved educational data systems that link students to their teachers, this research has used a class of statistical techniques called value-added models to estimate teachers’ impact on their students’ standardized test p...

In this paper we report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given public interest in workforce policies that implicitly assume effectiveness is a stable attribute within teachers. The results strongly reject the hypothesis that teacher performance is completely stable within teachers over long periods of time, but esti...

In recent years, education policymakers have shown growing interest in the potential of incentive pay for teachers as a way to improve student performance. Champions of this approach contend that incentive pay based on student performance can motivate teachers to improve their teaching practices, which in turn will boost student achievement; in addition, over the longer term, rewarding quality ...

Germ line variants at chromosome 8q24 have been associated with prostate, colorectal, and breast cancer risk (1-7). This region is also frequently amplified in many tumor types (8, 9) including endometrial cancer (10-13). The involvement of germ line and somatic variations at 8q24 suggests a common biological mechanism in the pathogenesis of epithelial cancers. In the present analysis, we used ...