I came across the same issue when dealing with a non-trivial view (there are nested scopes). And finally discovered this is a known tricky thing when developing AngularJS application due to the nature of prototype-based inheritance of java-script. AngularJS nested scopes are created through this mechanism. And value created from ng-model is placed in children scope, not saying parent scope (maybe the one injected into controller) won't see the value, the value will also shadow any property with same name defined in parent scope if not use dot to enforce a prototype reference access. For more details, checkout the online video specific to illustrate this issue, http://egghead.io/video/angularjs-the-dot/ and comments following up it.