Hands - on activities include observing children and writing
objective observation notes, evaluating a child portfolio, and communicating assessment information with families.
In the end (which is actually near the beginning of the manuscript), Goldhaber
notes that VAMs are «distinct» as compared to classroom
observations, because they offer «an
objective measure that does not rely on human interpretation of teacher practices, and by design, [they offer] a system in which teachers are evaluated relative to one another rather than relative to an absolute standard (i.e., it creates a distribution in which teachers can be ranked).