STRAND: Discerning Quality
TITLE: Student Teaching Assessment Instruments: Measuring the Knowledge, Skills, and
Dispositions That Impact Student Learning
DESCRIPTION: (MUST NOT EXCEED 30 WORDS): The purpose of this session is to share
results from four studies conducted over three years about 75 student teaching assessment
instruments from teacher education programs across the country.
DESCRIPTORS: Performance Assessment, Student Teaching, and Evidence of Quality
Section I: Content
Statement of the Issue:
Teacher education programs are being held to higher and higher standards and are increasingly
called to justify their purpose and usefulness in preparing future teachers. Critics want to know
-- How do colleges of education produce quality, professional candidates to enter the field of
education? One way is through accreditation systems that are demanding higher accountability
and performance-assessments. For example, colleges of education are working to ensure the
quality of their teacher candidates by using a variety of performance-based rubrics to assess
competencies and dispositions of their students. This is not an easy task, and it is essential that
assessment instruments measure the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that clearly demonstrate
student achievement has been positively impacted. The purpose of this presentation is to share
results from four studies conducted over three years about student teaching assessment
instruments from teacher education programs across the country.
Literature Review/Knowledge Base:
Creating and effectively using instruments to assess candidate performance and taking
that data to make program improvements is a critical piece of any quality teacher preparatory
program. However, defining effective t eaching and identifying effective teaching behaviors are
both complicated and problematic. Developing and working with an assessment instrument that
adequately measures the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are most likely to positively
impact student achievement is one of the most difficult tasks for a teacher education program.
Without question, the student teaching experience has always been an “authentic”
assessment of a teacher intern’s performance in the classroom, and teacher education programs
continue to use the capstone experience of student teaching as the culminating evaluation event
for their candidates. Unfortunately, student teachers have often been evaluated using subjective
and inconsistent measures. Assessment instruments vary from one page check sheets, to open-
ended narrative statements, to multi-page rating systems. Some instruments provide detailed
descriptions of expected behaviors while others only provide one-word or short-phrase
descriptors for the evaluator to make a judgment. This leads to the question – What are the best
ways to assess student teaching using a performance-based rubric?
The purpose of this presentation is to share results from four studies conducted over three
years about assessment instruments from teacher education programs across the country and to
make recommendations in order to help teacher education programs better assess the knowledge,
skills, and dispositions of their student teachers.
Contribution:
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Convention