Abstract
Recent challenges concerning the quality of teachers and the programs that prepare them have resulted in responses from professional organizations that have been more widespread and intense than in the past (Robinson, 2011; Wiseman, 2012). The Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation (BRP) formed by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the merger of NCATE and Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) into Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) to improve teacher education (Cibulka, 2011), and the Teacher Performance Assessment Initiative which emerged from collaboration between the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) member institutions (Robinson, 2011) are examples of ways that professional organizations have responded to the challenges. In general, calls for performance assessments of teaching to provide both formative and summative information about the quality of teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher preparation programs pervade the current discourse on education at every level, including schools and districts, institutions of higher education, state and national policymaking entities, and professional organizations. As a result, a number of performance assessments have emerged that can provide feedback to teacher education programs about the strengths and weaknesses of their candidates as well as evidence for licensure and certification of teachers. For example, Education Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) was designed to provide information for program improvement through the use of a common set of performance assessments for preservice teachers and has also been adopted by states and districts for summative evaluation purposes (http://edtpa.aacte.org/). The multiple performance measures in systems like edTPA improve upon value added models (VAM) by providing information on teaching quality, not just teacher quality or teacher effectiveness, and provide information sooner than might be accomplished by use of VAM alone (Newton, 2010).
For this theme issue, we invited research and conceptual articles related to teacher performance assessments specifically as they affect teacher education, including validation studies of measures used in the assessments. We posed a series of questions that we considered important for researchers to address related to performance assessments, including the following:
What are the relationships between current performance assessments and teacher education, either conceptually or in terms of outcomes?
What do we know about the use of performance assessments in the context of teacher education, and what do we need to know? How do performance assessments of teachers in schools map onto assessment of teacher education programs, or how don’t they?
What differences may exist across novice teachers and expert teachers with respect to performance assessment, and how does that impact their professional learning?
What are the implications of the relationships between for-profit companies, university teacher education programs, researchers, states, and professional organizations with respect to performance assessments of teachers?
What is the relationship between assessment criteria and the research on teaching and learning, and what are its implications for teacher education?
How do states make decisions to move to statewide teacher assessment systems? What potential conflicts of interest may exist among various stakeholders in performance assessment efforts?
How do policies related to performance assessment of teachers affect opportunities for teacher learning?
What can we learn from the history of past efforts to evaluate beginning teachers? What is different this time?
What do we know about the validity and reliability of performance assessments and why does this matter?
Introduction of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) Senior Advisers
In addition to the emphasis on the theme of performance assessment, this issue introduces an important element that recently has been added to the Journal. In the past, we have had the benefit of AACTE’s Committee on Research and Dissemination, whose names are listed on the inside cover of every issue, for oversight and connection to AACTE, our sponsoring professional organization. We also have enjoyed a large and committed group of ad hoc reviewers listed in the last issue of each volume who perform the function of topic and quality control through their peer reviews of manuscripts submitted to JTE. During our editorship, we further institutionalized this function by naming an Editorial Review Board of 60 scholars (listed on the inside cover of each issue) in various areas of expertise related to teacher education who will serve 1- to 3-year terms and will be replaced as needed by outstanding ad hoc reviewers. More recently, in conjunction with the leadership of AACTE, we formed a special advisory group of leaders in teacher education research, policy, and practice who provide direct feedback on topics and issues in teacher education to our editorial team. The names of the Senior Advisers will also now appear on the inside cover of the Journal. We convened the first meeting of this group in April 2015 in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association held in Philadelphia (http://edprepmatters.net/2014/04/jte-senior-advisers-convene-at-aera-conference/). We asked the group, with Suzanne Wilson from the University of Connecticut serving as the moderator, to help us identify research questions that are most promising in the field as well as ways of sharing the teacher education knowledge base both within and outside the profession. While the group responded with a number of suggestions, one emerged that is particularly pertinent to our theme issue—identification and validation of a set of assessment instruments that can be compared across studies and used to further build our knowledge base. Prior to this theme issue, the policy of JTE had been to discourage submission of instrument validation studies as there were other psychometric journals considered more appropriate for this kind of research. During the course of the discussion with the Senior Advisers, it became apparent that inclusion of these kinds of studies in JTE has the potential to assist us in our goals of integrating teacher education research into a more coherent system by providing common vocabulary and criteria across studies of similar phenomena. In particular, it would be difficult to move the research on performance assessments forward and to consider the impact of mandated, high-stakes performance assessment, without knowledge and understanding of the specific measures and instruments used in this area. For this reason, the call for the theme issue specifically listed the need for research on validation of performance assessment instruments, and this issue has several studies that address this need.
Highlights of Theme Articles
The theme issue includes four articles that address some of the questions posed in our call for manuscripts. Two of the articles focus on the use of observation instruments in performance assessment. The first article, “Observation and Teacher Quality: Critical Analysis of Observation Instruments in Pre-Service Teacher Performance Assessment” by Samantha Caughlan and Heng Jiang, uses critical discourse analysis to examine three observation instruments representing rubric, leveled checklist, and notes-based approaches to observations used in performance assessments of preservice teachers. They examine how the instruments mediate the relationship between teacher educators and teacher candidates and the nature of the values reflected by the instruments. Their analysis reveals little elaboration in any of the instruments of the role of the teacher educator as well as inconsistencies between theories of learning that support K-12 students’ learning and those associated with teacher candidate learning.
In the second article, “Can We Identify a Successful Teacher Better, Faster, Cheaper? Evidence for Innovating Teacher Observation Systems,” Michael Strong and John Gargani address the practical reality of using observations in teacher performance assessment to assess the degree to which teachers perform according to a set of standards. The authors discuss the tensions caused by the complexity inherent in the use of evidence-based observation instruments and the heavy resources needed to implement them. They describe a simpler instrument designed specifically to predict teachers’ ability to raise student test scores and present the results of seven validation studies that use the Measure of Effective Teaching project findings as benchmarks for comparison.
The next two articles focus on the validity of two commonly used performance assessment systems, PACT and edTPA. “Examining the Internal Structure Evidence for the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT): A Validation Study of the Elementary Literacy Teaching Event for Tier 1 Teacher Licensure,” by Duckor, Castellano, Tellez, Wihardini, and Wilson, highlights the concern that many educators have expressed about the consequences and use of high-stakes measures for teacher licensure and certification and the obligation of researchers to monitor the validity evidence of these systems that so heavily impact individuals and institutions. Duckor and his colleagues use item response theory (IRT) analyses to determine the extent to which the internal structure of the California-mandated teacher performance assessment supports the claim that the PACT measures what it purports to measure. While the findings indicate sufficient validity evidence to support its limited use as a summative assessment, findings do not support the five different domains proposed by developers and currently reported as subscores.
The final contribution, “What Is the Underlying Conception of Teaching of the EdTPA?” by Mistilino Sato, focuses on the understanding of the value assumptions about the outcomes of teaching inherent in the assessment system as important for any discussion of the validity of edTPA. She outlines the arguments for and against edTPA and discusses the compatibility of the system with approaches such as critical pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy. The discussion enhances our understanding of the relationship between the edTPA and major traditions in teaching and the criticisms of those who do not support edTPA.
Overview of Non-Theme Articles
In addition to the theme articles described previously, this issue features two articles on topics of ongoing interest to JTE readers. Helenrose Fives and Michelle Buehl, in “Exploring Differences in Practicing Teachers’ Valuing of Pedagogical Knowledge Based on Teaching Ability Beliefs,” explore why professional learning experiences may work for some teachers and not others. The authors identify clusters of teachers based on their ability beliefs to determine whether there are differences in their views of the importance of teaching knowledge that might influence their receptivity to professional development. Findings indicate some patterns that may assist in the design of effective professional learning experiences based on ability beliefs.
The final article, “Excavating the Teacher Pipeline: Teacher Preparation Programs and Teacher Attrition,” by James Cowan and Dan Goldhaber, examines differences in teacher attrition rates in 20 teacher preparation programs in Washington. They discuss possible reasons for leaving the profession that can be tied to teacher preparation programs, including differences in the type of students attracted to the program, their preparation, their satisfaction with the program, and the places where they go to teach. Findings indicate wide variation in attrition across programs but more variation within than across programs. Teachers credentialed outside of the state were more likely to leave in 5 years.
We hope that the theme articles included in this issue contribute to your understanding of performance assessment and encourage you to continue the discussion with your colleagues and students. The questions posed in the call for manuscripts for this issue and the findings and issues raised in the theme articles provide a number of promising directions for further study. We encourage you to continue the conversations the authors and editors have initiated by submitting manuscripts and commentaries on both theme and non-theme topics and others of interest to the journal. We also look forward to receiving your ideas directed toward improvement of the Journal of Teacher Education.