Section archive - Assessment & Evaluation

This article describes the development of an embedded, multi-semester internship that incorporated an intensive field experience delivered in partnership with a local district. It was theorized that the activities associated with the internship and the related partnership have the potential to be a powerful way to structure teacher learning to impact theory-practice connections and improve candidates’ efficacy for teaching and learning. Preliminary data collection in the form of surveys and focus group meetings have revealed positive outcomes, including perceptions of readiness to teach and the development of relationships between various stakeholders. Subsequent analyses will examine the impact on observable classroom behaviors, performance on the edTPA, and impact on teacher self-efficacy.

In response to increased accountability demands placed on teacher preparation programs across the US, some programs are using standardized teacher performance assessments, such as edTPA. A recent mandate for this study’s elementary teacher preparation program is teacher candidates’ successful completion of edTPA for teacher certification. A case study design explored the experiences and views of multiple stakeholders (instructors, supervisors, administrators, teacher candidates, and cooperating teachers, N = 60) as they engaged in edTPA. Data were collected via two surveys and individual interviews. The effects of edTPA were visible across the data in a variety of ways, as stakeholders found the assessment overwhelming, often taking precedence because of its high-stakes nature. Changes were questioned, as this program was already held in high regard and produced high-quality teachers prepared for urban school contexts. Analysis of the interview data revealed three themes: Assets of edTPA, edTPA-produced Changes, and Not a Fair Measure.

Use of video as a representation of practice in teacher education is commonplace. The current study explored the use of a new format (360 video) in the context of preservice teachers’ professional noticing. Findings suggest that preservice teachers viewing 360 videos attended to more student actions than their peers viewing standard video. In addition, using a virtual reality headset to view the 360 videos led to different patterns in where preservice teachers looked in the recorded classroom, and to increased specificity of mathematics content from the scenario. Thus, findings and results support the use of 360 video in teacher education to facilitate teacher noticing. However, future research is needed to further explore this novel technology.

Teacher educators’ practices include providing written feedback to preservice teachers. Aims of written feedback include providing information to preservice teachers about their ideas and practices as well as sustaining ongoing relationships. In this article the authors argue that factors mediating written feedback practice support the informational purposes of feedback while displacing time and space for relational purposes. This argument stems from their self-study using dialogic analysis of three mathematics teacher educators’ conversations and narratives about their written feedback. Analysis of their narratives and transcripts of conversations focused on written feedback practice through the lens of relational teacher education. They found three factors that mediated their written feedback practices: their mathematics identities, assignment structures, and accreditation. To illustrate the factors they share three vignettes crafted from transcripts of conversations and narratives of their written feedback. These themes, while unique to their contexts, illustrate ways teacher educators’ explicit values and goals for teaching about teaching can be crowded out by unexamined factors living within enactments of professional practice. Their findings are contextually bound, but coupled with other self-studies of written feedback illustrate that written feedback practice is informed by teacher educators’ values and context.