Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project Series

The Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET)

The MET project is based on two premises: First, to a significant extent a teacher's evaluation should depend on his/her students' achievement gains; second, any additional components of the evaluation (e.g., classroom observations) should be valid predictors of student achievement gain.

Student achievement was measured in two ways -- through existing state assessments, designed to assess student progress on the state curriculum for accountability purposes, and supplemental assessments, designed to assess higher-order conceptual understanding. The supplemental assessments used were Stanford 9 Open-Ended Reading Assessment in grades 4 through 8, Balanced Assessment in Mathematics (BAM) in grades 4 through 8, and the ACT QualityCore series for Algebra I, English 9, and Biology.

Panoramic digital video of classroom sessions were taken of participating teachers and students, teachers submitted commentary on their lessons (e.g., specifying the learning objective) and then trained raters scored the lesson based on classroom observation protocols using the following five observation protocols:

• Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), developed by Robert Pianta, University of Virginia
• Framework for Teaching, developed by Charlotte Danielson
• Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI), developed by Heather Hill, Harvard University, and Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan
• Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO), developed by Pam Grossman, Stanford University
• Quality Science Teaching (QST) Instrument, developed by Raymond Pecheone, Stanford University

A subset of the videos also are being scored using an observational protocol developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS).

Close to 3,000 teacher volunteers from across the following six, predominantly urban, school districts participated in the MET project: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Dallas Independent School District, Denver Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools, Memphis City Schools, and the New York City Department of Education. Participants teach math and English language arts (ELA) in grades 4-8, Algebra I, grade 9 English, and high school biology.

The District-Wide Files

The district wide files are comprised of one data file per district for each of the 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2010-2011, 2011-2012, 2012-2013, and 2013-2014 school years, for a total of thirty-six data files. Each file contains information on each student in the school district including student demographic variables, such as race, age and gender, specialty student status variables such as free lunch, English language learner, and gifted and talented program participation, and student-level test rankings for math and reading. Also included are the aggregate means of those student demographic, specialty status, and test score variables for each teacher.

Two versions of the SAS code used for creating the original value-added measures for teachers in each district are also provided with the data files. The non-aggregated version of the code uses the individual math and reading test rankings for each of a teacher's students to calculate predictive score estimates. The aggregated version of the code uses the mean math and reading test rankings for all of that teacher's students to calculate estimates.

The Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET)

The MET project is based on two premises: First, a teacher's evaluation should depend to a significant extent on his/her students' achievement gains; second, any additional components of the evaluation (e.g., classroom observations) should be valid predictors of student achievement gain.

Student achievement was measured in two ways -- through existing state assessments, designed to assess student progress on the state curriculum for accountability purposes, and supplemental assessments, designed to assess higher-order conceptual understanding. The supplemental assessments used were Stanford 9 Open-Ended Reading Assessment in grades 4 through 8, Balanced Assessment in Mathematics (BAM) in grades 4 through 8, and the ACT QualityCore series for Algebra I, English 9, and Biology.

Panoramic digital video of classroom sessions were taken of participating teachers and students, teachers submitted commentary on their lessons (e.g., specifying the learning objective) and then trained raters scored the lesson based on classroom observation protocols using the following five observation protocols:

• Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), developed by Robert Pianta, University of Virginia
• Framework for Teaching, developed by Charlotte Danielson
• Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI), developed by Heather Hill, Harvard University, and Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan
• Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO), developed by Pam Grossman, Stanford University
• Quality Science Teaching (QST) Instrument, developed by Raymond Pecheone, Stanford University

A subset of the videos also are being scored using an observational protocol developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and using the UTeach Observational Protocol (UTOP), developed by the UTeach Preparation Program.

Close to 3,000 teacher volunteers from across the following six, predominantly urban, school districts participated in the MET project: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Dallas Independent School District, Denver Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools, Memphis City Schools, and the New York City Department of Education. Participants teach math and English language arts (ELA) in grades 4-8, Algebra I, grade 9 English, and high school biology.

The Observation Score Calibration and Validation File

The Observation Score Calibration and Validation file enables psychometric research on rater error. The MET Project may be the largest application of instruments designed to measure teacher effectiveness from classroom observations ever conducted. More than eight hundred raters were trained to score over fifteen thousand videos recorded by teachers in the MET Project. The result is a database of more than 2.4 million scored items from five observations instruments:

1. Framework for Teaching (FFT)
2. Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS)
3. Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI)
4. Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO)
5. Quality of Science Teaching (QST)

This data file has all scores assigned by raters, including scores used to evaluate raters during the scoring process. Each row in the file is the score assigned to a segment of a video by a rater under one of the five instruments evaluated by the MET Project.

MET observation scores were assigned remotely using a web application supervised by ETS and Teachscape (exception of the UTOP instrument, which was managed by the National Math and Science Initiative [NMSI]) that displayed excerpts of videos and prompted raters for scores. Raters were trained on videos that had been "master scored" with "true" scores. At the beginning of every scoring session raters were assigned pre-scored "calibration" videos to assure that instruments were applied consistently. Even after they were approved for scoring, raters were occasionally given "validation" videos to be sure that their scores were consistent with expectations. Please see Gathering Feedback for Teaching: Combining High-Quality Observations with Student Surveys and Achievement Gains Research Paper on the MET Project Web site, as well as Section 6.3 "Classroom Videos and Video Scoring Processes" of the User Guide for complete details.

The Observation Score Calibration and Validation file is provided for research on questions like the consistency of scoring across raters. For example, these data show how often raters failed validation tests and needed to be re-trained on each item used in the MET Project. Users who want to combine observation scores based on videos with other types of MET data should use the observation scores found in the Core [ICPSR 34414] or Basic [ICPSR 34346] data files.

Also included in this release is a Scoring Design Memorandum from MET researchers at ETS and Teachscape written in 2011 to MET Project leadership which describes procedures for creating observation scores for MET videos.

The MET project is based on two premises: First, a teacher's evaluation should depend to a significant extent on his/her students' achievement gains; second, any additional components of the evaluation (e.g., classroom observations) should be valid predictors of student achievement gain.

Student achievement was measured in two ways -- through existing state assessments, designed to assess student progress on the state curriculum for accountability purposes, and supplemental assessments, designed to assess higher-order conceptual understanding.

Panoramic digital video of classroom sessions were taken of participating teachers and students, teachers submitted commentary on their lessons (e.g., specifying the learning objective) and then trained raters scored the lesson based on classroom observation protocols using the following five observation protocols:

• Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), developed by Robert Pianta, University of Virginia
• Framework for Teaching (FFT), developed by Charlotte Danielson
• Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI), developed by Heather Hill, Harvard University, and Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan
• Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO), developed by Pam Grossman, Stanford University
• Quality Science Teaching (QST) Instrument, developed by Raymond Pecheone, Stanford University

A subset of the videos also are being scored using an observational protocol developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and using the UTeach Observational Protocol (UTOP), developed by the UTeach Preparation Program.

Close to 3,000 teacher volunteers from across the following 6, predominantly urban, school districts participated in the MET project: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Dallas Independent School District, Denver Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools, Memphis City Schools, and the New York City Department of Education. Participants teach math and English language arts (ELA) in grades 4-8, Algebra I, grade 9 English, and high school biology.

The Item-Level Observational Scores Release

This release consists of data files for the five observational protocols listed (CLASS, FFT, MQI, PLATO, and QST) and the UTOP subset. Also included are rater comment files explaining rater scores on the CLASS instrument and master coded scores for the CLASS, FFT, PLATO, MQI and QST observational measures.