Chapter 8: The Evaluation of Teachers and Schools Using The Educator Response Function (ERF)

One of the current challenges for educational policymakers and administrators is to determine whether the teachers, schools, and the entire educational infrastructure are successfully helping students reach the educational goals specified by educational policy. These educational goals are frequently operationalized as points on the reporting score scale for tests designed to assess students’ achievement of the specified educational goals. One point on the score scale is often labeled as the “Proficient” cut score. Results from these assessments are frequently reported as the percentage of students who meet or exceed the Proficient standard on the test.

Sometimes more elaborate reporting mechanisms are used based on multiple reporting categories. For example, the NAEP reports results using four categories that are ordered from high to low in level of proficiency: Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and an unnamed category that is below Basic. When multiple reporting categories are used, attention is often focused on the amount of movement of students from a lower performance category to a higher performance category. The boundaries between performance categories are points on the reporting score scale that are determined through standard setting processes. Burt and Stapleton (2010) describe the meaning of the category labels for a number of different testing programs.