Abstract:

A new assessment tool to evaluate the preparation of pre-service teachers has been developed in the United States in the last few years and will soon became one of the most high-stakes assessment tools in teacher certification. The Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA) was established in California as a result of the recommendations of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and state legislation that aimed at ensuring the quality of teachers and increasing the confidence that the public had in teachers and their preparation. The TPA was developed by a team of Stanford researchers and supported by a consortium of more than 20 states and their state departments of education, licensing boards, and institutions of higher education, as well as the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. Starting year 2008, all teacher candidates must pass this standardized performance assessment in order to become licensed in California. After an overall successful experience in this state, a move to make this assessment a requirement in other states has emerged. In order to help the TPA become a nationally available assessment of readiness to teach for novices, Pearson Corporation has joined the scene. Pearson will provide Stanford University with the capability to deliver the TPA nationally via a web-based platform that allows for electronic submission and nationwide scoring. More than 20 states are considering adopting this form of standardized assessment to evaluate and certify their teaching candidates. The high-stakes implications for education students and colleges make the analysis of this assessment and its implementation of paramount importance.
The TPA is an authentic, performance-based assessment designed around 4 principles or assumptions about successful teachers. These principles imply that successful teachers: 1) apply knowledge of subject matter and subject-specific pedagogy; 2) develop and apply knowledge of students’ varied needs; 3) consider research/theory about how students learn; and 4) reflect and act on the effects of their instruction on student learning. Teacher candidates must complete four major tasks to prove their abilities in four dimensions of teaching: Planning, Instruction, Assessment, and Analyzing Teaching. For each task, candidates must “complete an extensive commentary articulating the rationale for the choices and actions undertaken. These tasks are evaluated with rubrics that identify 5 levels of “proficiency”, representing the range of performance expected from novice to advanced teachers. The ability of the candidates to demonstrate that they can produce learning gain in their students is a key element of this assessment.
The presentation will describe the major contributions of the TPA, examine issues of reliability and validity, and analyze the experience of one Teacher Education Program with the implementation of this instrument in the last two years. It will illustrate some of the tensions that arise when trying to comply with state mandated policies and changes; with insights from both teacher educators and teacher candidates. The information presented will be valuable to other teacher education programs or colleges of education, either in the US or in other countries, and to educational policymakers that are trying to improve the ways in which they assess the quality of their teachers and the overall effectiveness of their teaching programs.

Keywords:

Teacher education, Teacher licensing, High-stakes assessment, Teaching performance assessment, Teaching Professional Standards.