Measuring Teacher Effectiveness in Gifted Education: Some Challenges and Suggestions

States and districts are under increasing pressure to evaluate the effectiveness of their teachers and to ensure that all students receive high-quality instruction. This article describes some of the challenges associated with current effectiveness approaches, including paper-and-pencil tests of pedagogical content knowledge, classroom observation systems, and value-added models. It proposes development of a new teacher evaluation system using a virtual reality environment and describes how innovations in educational measurement and technology can be used to develop an improved teacher effectiveness measure.