To guide data-based decision making in schools, it is important to focus not only on how to best measure students’ needs, but also on how to measure and integrate data on teacher practices. The purpose of this special issue is to describe and present findings from research on the measurement of teacher practices and approaches for facilitating and evaluating school personnel’s use of data to inform instructional decisions that promote student achievement. Two initial articles in this special issue focus on approaches for measuring teacher practices/processes. The following two articles describe structured technology-driven approaches for facilitating, investigating, and evaluating job-embedded teacher professional development in the form of coaching. A final article provides an illustrative example of the application of a measure for assessing teacher practices in the classroom. The special issue concludes with an expert commentary on this work and future directions for research and practice.

中文翻译：

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为教师实践提供信息的形成性评估方法：关键考虑因素

为了指导学校基于数据的决策，重要的是不仅要关注如何最好地衡量学生的需求，还要关注如何衡量和整合有关教师实践的数据。本期特刊的目的是描述和展示关于教师实践的测量以及促进和评估学校人员使用数据为促进学生成绩的教学决策提供信息的方法的研究结果。本期特刊中的两篇初始文章侧重于衡量教师实践/过程的方法。以下两篇文章描述了结构化技术驱动的方法，以指导的形式促进、调查和评估嵌入工作的教师专业发展。最后一篇文章提供了一个说明性示例，说明了在课堂上评估教师实践的措施的应用。本期特刊以对这项工作和未来研究和实践方向的专家评论结束。