Multidimensional Assessment of Value Added by Teachers to Real-World Outcomes

Measuring teacher effectiveness is challenging since no direct estimate exists; teacher effectiveness can be measured only indirectly through student responses. Traditional value-added assessment (VAA) models generally attempt to estimate the value that an individual teacher adds to students' knowledge as measured by scores on successive administrations of a standardized test. Such responses, however, do not reflect the long-term contribution of a teacher to real-world student outcomes such as graduation, and cannot be used in most university settings where standardized tests are not given. In this paper, the authors develop a multiresponse approach to VAA models that allows responses to be either continuous or categorical. This approach leads to multidimensional estimates of value added by teachers and allows the correlations among those dimensions to be explored. The authors derive sufficient conditions for maximum likelihood estimators to be consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. The authors then demonstrate how to use SAS software to calculate estimates. The models are applied to university data from 2001 to 2008 on calculus instruction and graduation in a science or engineering field.