The purpose of this study was to answer the following research questions: (1) Do secondary social studies pre-service teachers incorporate literacy strategies in their work samples during student teaching? (2) To what extent and under what conditions do secondary social studies pre-service teachers use higher levels of literacy strategies in their…

This study provides a descriptive analysis of teacher evaluation documents used in the state of Washington in 2010-2011. The purpose of the research was to understand what documents were used, differences and similarities from district to district, and the extent to which they conformed to state administrative rules and what the literature argues…

The current wave of new teacher evaluation systems around the country offers an opportunity to broaden the conversation surrounding teacher effectiveness and its relationship to school coherence, to look at how schools and school systems might take a more integrated and intentional approach to attracting, training, and managing high-quality…

As accountability in education has become an increasingly prominent topic, teacher preparation programs are being asked to provide credible evidence that their teacher candidates can impact student learning. Teacher Work Samples, first developed 30 years ago, have emerged as an effective method of quantifying the complex set of tasks that comprise…

Part-time and adjunct faculty members have been present in institutions of higher learning since the founding of this country. These groups of faculty provide a variety of unique professional experiences to their students; they offer financial savings and scheduling flexibility for their colleges and on many levels, adjuncts offer a range of other…

"It's All About Student Learning Assessing Teacher Candidates' Ability to Impact P-12 Students", provides practical assistance for institutions designing or revising assessment systems or individual assessments for use by units or programs. The publication includes performance assessments currently used by teacher preparation institutions and…

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) sent a research team to Western Oregon University (WOU) on November 17-18, 2008, to conduct interviews with individuals who play important roles in the university's teacher preparation program. These interviews, along with additional materials provided by WOU and identified by the AED research team,…

Background: To attain accurate information about student performance, teachers must apply sound classroom assessment practices. First, teachers need to be able to understand and identify the purpose of their assessments. Teachers also need to provide their students with clear learning targets, in language that students can easily understand, so…

To teach the rigorous skills and knowledge students need to succeed in future college-entry courses and workforce training programs, education stakeholders have increasingly called for more rigorous curricula, instruction, and assessments. Identifying the critical attributes of rigor and measuring its appearance in curricular materials is…

Successfully implementing the practice of inclusion by differentiating instruction is dependent upon both the skills and attitudes of general education teachers. New general education teachers who are entering the field are particularly vulnerable to the demands and stress of the profession, and exemplary preservice teacher education programs must…

Professional integrity and changing demographics in the public school system in the United States coupled with standards for teacher preparation require that preservice teachers possess knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to work with diverse populations. Using the Teacher Work Sample, a plan for instruction serving as a teacher…

Teacher work sample methodology is a form of performance assessment that requires the teacher to describe, analyze, and reflect on student assessment data to improve both instruction and student learning. Some teacher preparation programs have adopted teacher work sample methodology as a means of teaching teacher candidates to gather and analyze…

A number of applied psychologists have suggested that trainability test Black-White ethnic group differences are low or relatively low (e.g., Siegel & Bergman, 1975), though data are scarce. Likewise, there are relatively few estimates of criterion-related validity for trainability tests predicting job performance (cf. Robertson & Downs, 1989). We…

Successfully implementing the practice of inclusion by differentiating instruction depends on both the skills and attitudes of general education teachers. New general education teachers who are entering the field are particularly vulnerable to the demands and stress of the profession, and teacher education programs must prepare preservice teachers…

When multiple raters score a writing sample, on occasion they will award discrepant scores. To report a single score to the examinee, some method of resolving those differences must be applied to the ratings before an operational score can be reported. Several forms of resolving score discrepancies have been described in the literature. Initial…