Congratulations to Ms. Dessi Kirova, Research Analyst at the Center for Effective School Practices and doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Education, and Dr. Drew Gitomer, the Rose and Nicolas DeMarzo Chair in Education also at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, for being selected to present their paper at the 39^th Annual Conference of the Eastern Evaluation Research Society to be held in Absecon, New Jersey on May 1-3, 2016. This year’s conference theme will be Improving Outcomes, Building Knowledge: Finding What Works.

Their paper entitled “Evaluating High Stakes Policy Implementation: The Case of Student Growth Objectives”, addresses the implementation of Student Growth Objectives (SGOs) as a measure of teacher effectiveness. This study is based on the evaluation of the implementation process in one elementary school with a large population of English language learners takes a socio-cognitive approach to the study of reform implementation while emphasizing implementers’ motivation in developing reform-focused interpretations of the policy’s intent.