Testing Teacher Candidates The Role of Licensure Tests in Improving Teacher Quality (2001) / Chapter Skim
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8. Improving Teacher Licensure Testing
8. Improving Teacher Licensure Testing
Pages 147-162
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From page 147... ...
As part of their reforms in teacher education and licensure, states are attempting to align newly developed teaching standards with their licensure requirements. Traditionally, teacher licensure has required candidates to complete an approved teacher preparation program and to pass the state's required tests.
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From page 148... ...
Selecting Assessment Cases The committee's initial search for performance-based assessment identified only one state that used performance assessments operationally to make initial licensure decisions. The committee then expanded its search to include performance assessments used by teacher education programs to warrant teacher education students' competence and performance assessments used in second-stage licensure and certification.
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From page 149... ...
Finally, the committee studied Alverno College's integrated ongoing learning and assessment program for teacher candidates. Alverno's program is of interest because it provides an example of a system in which a party other than a state or district could warrant teacher competence.
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From page 150... ...
While in some cases there is regular monitoring of the other parts of the system (e.g., the state accredits teacher education institutions) , in other cases the focal agency or organization may only lay out expectations and/or make assumptions about other components of the system with which it is not directly involved (e.g., the National Board suggests and publicizes local support initiatives but does not take responsibility for implementing or monitoring them)
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From page 152... ...
NBPTS maintains an ongoing program of psychometric research into the technical quality of its assessments. Evidence routinely gathered for each assessment includes documentation of the development process, estimates of reliability and measurement error, expert judgments about the fit between the assessments and the content standards, examination of disparate impact, and evidence of the validity of the scoring process.
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From page 153... ...
The competencies encompass the body of knowledge and skills the state believes individuals should develop as they progress through the teacher education program. Prospective teachers must pass Praxis I to enter a teacher preparation program and Praxis II to be recommended for licensure.
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From page 154... ...
The PATHWISE Induction Program-Praxis III Version consists of 10 structured tasks designed to encourage collaboration between beginning teachers and their mentors. One task, for example, requires beginning teachers to gather information from colleagues, journals, and texts about particular aspects of teaching and, with a mentor's guidance, to use the information to develop an instructional plan, implement it, and reflect on the experience.
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From page 155... ...
Mentors receive training in the PATHWISE Induction Program-Praxis III Version, and their service as mentor teachers can be part of their individual professional development plans that count toward licensure renewal. The Praxis III assessment, which is designed to be used across content areas, employs three data collection methods: direct observation of classroom practice, written materials prepared by the beginning teacher describing the students and the instructional objectives, and interviews structured around classroom observations.
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From page 156... ...
The six levels for each ability area represent a developmental sequence that begins with awareness of one's own performance process for a given ability and that specifies increasingly complex knowledge, skills, and dispositions. The teacher education program at Alverno College builds on the foundation provided by the eight general education abilities.
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From page 157... ...
· Integrative interaction: Acting with professional values as a situational decision maker, adapting to the changing needs of the environment in order to develop students as learners. These teaching abilities refine and extend the general education abilities into the professional teaching context; they define professional levels of proficiency that are required for graduation from any of the teacher education programs.
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From page 158... ...
Support systems draw on the capabilities of experienced teachers, thereby supporting professional development for experienced teachers as well as beginning teachers.
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From page 159... ...
For our purposes, it serves as an existence proof that centrally administered, large-scale, high-stakes assessments of teaching performance can meet professional standards of technical quality for standardized assessments. As such it provides an important model for states, districts, teacher preparation programs, or other organizations developing performance-based assessments.
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From page 160... ...
Cross-fertilization among these programs and between these programs and more conventional assessment practices would be fruitful. Examining the relationships among different assessments of teacher competence would contribute relevant validity evidence by documenting commonalities and differences that can and should be explained as part of a program' s overall plan for validity research.
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From page 161... ...
The developmental nature of the systems in which these assessments reside, the varied ways in which candidates demonstrate their knowledge and skills within assessment forms, the balance between the information value of these assessments and the professional development benefits that accrue to examiners and other participants, and other differences raise issues about the validity evidence needed to support them.
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From page 162... ...
The committee challenges test developers, practitioners, and researchers to consider its evaluation framework as well as other more conventional evaluation frameworks and to decide which criteria best apply to judgments about newer forms of assessments, which criteria have important and helpful corollaries, and where new criteria may be needed that address the particular validity issues raised by performance-based assessments. For example, consistency and generalizability are important criteria in traditional evaluation frameworks; although they might be instantiated differently, they are potentially important concepts in evaluating alternative assessments as well.
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