Section archive - Assessment & Evaluation

In many teacher preparation programs at institutions of higher education in the United States, pre-service teachers receive mentoring and constructive feedback during their internship placement from an experienced supervising teacher and a university coordinator. Often the feedback loop is closed by asking interns, ‘was this useful?’ To better answer this question, researchers employed a phenomenological approach to collect interview and focus group data on the lived experiences, perceptions, and understandings of six pre-service special education interns during their internship experience. Emerging themes included satisfaction with level of support provided by supervisory stakeholders, a feeling of isolation from peer support, special consideration of the components within the evaluation tool, and a request to be provided with additional background information for their assigned university coordinators. These lessons were aggregated, presented, and then integrated into the experiences provided to forthcoming pre-service educators.

This sequential explanatory mixed-methods study examines the impact of analytic rubric use in peer feedback on preservice teachers’ ability to recognize indicators of best practice for second language lesson planning and lesson delivery. 53 preservice teachers in a university-level, semester-long Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) practicum course received direct instruction on indicators presented in the analytic rubrics. They were then randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. The experimental group used rubrics with the indicators during peer feedback tasks, while the control group used a modified rubric without the indicators. The result from an independent samples t-test on posttest mean scores indicated a significant difference between groups for both lesson planning and lesson delivery, favoring the experimental group. Qualitative data were also collected via written comments on the posttests and from focus-group interviews. From thematic analyses of qualitative data, three key themes emerged, including specific tensions that resulted from the type of feedback preservice teachers desired and the type of feedback they were willing to give to their peers. These findings provide further insight into the use of analytic rubrics in peer feedback practices in second language teacher education (SLTE).

This study examines ten preservice teachers’ use of Freiberg’s Person-Centered Learning Assessment (PCLA), a self-assessment measure. The PCLA serves as an individualized resource for educators to assess their classroom teaching and learning particularly in the affective domain. Study findings indicate that the 10 student teachers identified future pedagogical changes as a result of utilizing the PCLA, with eight student teachers specifically identifying changes in their classrooms prior to completion of the study. As explored in this study, self-assessments seem to provide novice educators with a unique form of feedback and have the potential to lead to deeper levels of pedagogical self-reflection and resulting changes.

The authors describe challenges that were confronted around the deployment of Louisiana’s value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs. Their discussion is organized around the challenges emerging from calculation, communication, and change. The discussion provides information that policy makers and teacher education leaders, rather than analysts, might find useful, and focuses on the types of challenges that a state or university system can expect to encounter in developing a value-added assessment. They describe decisions made in response to specific challenges that appear to have been successful and some that in retrospect appear to have been mistakes.