Stephen Ponisciak was a 2010 First Place winner in the area of Oustanding Planning, Policy, or Management Research from the American Educational Research Association Division H (Research, Evaluation, and Assessment in Schools)

Rob Meyer has been honored with a 2010 Academic Staff Excellence Award in recognition of excellence in research by an independent investigator. Winners were recognized by the Academic Staff Assembly on April 12 and honored at a reception with University of Wisconsin Chancellor Biddy Martin.

Amy McIntosh, New York City Department of Education Chief Talant Officer, discusses VARC’s contribution to the district’s teacher data initiative (New York City Department of Education website).

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ABOUT VARC

The Value-Added Research Center was founded in 2004 to pursue to the twin tasks of

• Conducting basic research to develop new and useful models of the productivity of schools, teachers, and administrators; and
• Working with school districts and states to disseminate these models and assess their real-world utility.

While continuing to concentrate on the development and implementation of value-added models, the Center has grown to include multiple research projects that concentrate on such diverse areas as:

• Enhancing data structures, data systems, and data quality to the point where it is useful for longitudinal analysis. This includes working with school administrators and vendors to examine the technical tools and human process used to collect, manage, analyze, and report information.
• Using value-added models to evaluate intervention strategies to determine their effectiveness.
• Creating a professional development curriculum to train districts and states how to use assessment data and compare and contrast the different uses for attainment and value-added outcome measures.
• Providing technical assistance to the developers of pay-for-performance educator compensation programs that use value-added models and indicators as a means of measuring teacher and administrator performance.

Housed in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Value-Added Research Center is home to multiple on-going research projects, and is funded by grants from sources such as U.S. Department of Education IES/NCES, NSF, and the Joyce Foundation. Research partners include the Milwaukee Public School System, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Chicago Public Schools, and Teacher Incentive Fund grant recipients.

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VARC is housed within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at
the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Copyright ©2008, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System