Highlights

Findings from a nationally representative survey of approximately 1,000 public elementary school teachers conducted in the spring of 1993 contain the following highlights:

• Most teachers (89 percent) believe their last performance evaluation provided an accurate assessment of their teaching performance. Seventy-four percent thought their last evaluation had been useful for improving their teaching (Table 5).
   
• A large majority of teachers (94 percent) reported that the criteria used for evaluating their performance were known to them prior to the evaluation process (Table 2).
   
• Ninety-two percent of teachers reported that their most recent evaluation included classroom observations that received a formal rating, and 69 percent said that informal observations were part of the last evaluation (Table 2).
   
• While 99 percent of elementary teachers said that subject matter knowledge should be a consideration in evaluating performance, only 65 percent said it had been considered to a great extent in their most recent evaluation (Table 3).
   
• Most teachers perceived that their evaluations were competent to judge their performance in selected aspects of teaching (Table 3).
   
• Three-fourths of public elementary school teachers reported that determining teachers" pay levels was not an objective of teacher performance evaluations at their school when they were last evaluated, and 50 percent agree that this should not be an objective (Table 6).

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