July/August 2008
Taking the Measure of New
Teachers
California shifts from
standardized tests to performance-based assessment as a condition
of licensure
by Robert Rothman
Like most states, California has long required
prospective teachers, whether they attended education schools
or entered the profession through alternate routes, to pass standardized
tests in basic skills and subject knowledge in order to earn their
licenses.
However, there is little evidence that performance
on these tests is associated with future performance in the classroom.
Teacher educators have therefore begun to look for ways to assess
the quality of a candidate’s work in the classroom, the
skills he or she has mastered, and the effects on student performance.
For the past five years, the teacher-education
faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB),
has been piloting a new tool that they believe allows them to
better assess both the qualifications of their graduates and the
strengths of their own academic program. The Performance
Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), developed by a
consortium of universities in that state, requires candidates
to prepare a portfolio that includes lesson plans, reflective
essays, videos, and examples of student work, all drawn from the
candidates’ internship or student-teaching experience.
“For the first time, we had concrete evidence
of what our candidates were doing [in the classroom],” says
Tine Sloan, acting director of the teacher-education program at
UCSB’s Gevirtz School of Education.
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Education Letter, click here.
Conversation
with Katherine K. Merseth
When 1/2 + 1/3 = 2/5
Investigating student thinking to teach fractions well
Earlier this year, the National
Mathematics Advisory Panel released 45 recommendations for
improving U.S. mathematics education. In particular, the report
singled out proficiency with fractions as a “major goal”
for K–8 math education, noting that “difficulty with
fractions (including decimals and percents) is pervasive and is
a major obstacle to further progress in mathematics, including
algebra.” Dr.
Katherine K. Merseth, director of the Teacher Education Program
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, specializes in the
teaching of math and science and was inducted last year into the
Massachusetts Hall of Fame for Mathematics Educators. Merseth
spoke with Harvard Education Letter contributing writer
Mitch Bogen about why fractions are hard to teach and what teachers
can do to help students better understand this critical concept.
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Education Letter, click here.
What's
Wrong with Wrong Answers?
Standardized tests fail to capture this
important data source
by Rebecca Kopriva
It may come as no surprise that the people who
design large-scale standardized tests focus primarily on right
answers. Almost all the technical mumbo-jumbo that goes into determining
if state or district tests are valid and reliable focuses on what
happens with the correct responses. For instance, to ensure that
questions are consistent, test designers expect to see reasonably
strong relationships between how a student does on one item and
their total score. To avoid bias, they compare correct answers
across groups of students. To make sure tests differentiate among
students with different skill levels, they compare the probability
of students’ getting right answers on items at varying levels
of difficulty. The only time they pay attention to wrong answers
is when they need to score students’ answers to open-ended
test items. For these types of questions, test designers create
rubrics or scoring keys so that students can get partial credit.
But in general, large-scale standardized tests do not report data
that capture the quality of wrong answers and how they differ
from the right responses—data that could provide important
insights to the development of students’ thinking.
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