University of California, Los Angeles, Urban Teacher Residency: Using Multiple Measures That Have Programmatic and Research Value

• In Event: 46.038 - Designing Innovative Urban Residency Programs: Using Multiple Measures to Connect Theory and Practice

Abstract

In 2010, UCLA initiated an urban teacher residency program. This program, which offers a residency pathway in the high-need fields of math, science, and early childhood education, is built from a strategic partnership of the program’s Teacher Education Program, a local non-profit support agency and the local school district. Consistent with priorities outlined by the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES), which recommend that educational researchers should work closely with practitioners and policy makers to improve student learning (Easton, 2010), we created a research group consisting of teacher educators, researchers, statisticians and program administrators to conduct collaborative research on the question, “How do urban teacher residencies lead to increased teacher quality?” This paper reports on our work from 2010-2012 to select a set of instruments that have programmatic and research value, collect data using these instruments, and use the data to inform practice in the field.

Multiple measures can provide better, more in-depth information because each source has unique strengths and limitations (John & Soto, 2007). With this in mind, we selected or developed seven measures to capture information about teaching practice and quality, aligned with the program’s framework for learning. The specific measures include program surveys of teacher attitudes and beliefs, pedagogical content knowledge assessments (including the Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching survey (Hill, Schilling, & Ball, 2004) and the Assessing Teacher Learning About Science Learning assessment , teacher logs of informal assessment practices (Rowan & Correnti, 2009), an observation protocol, classroom artifacts (collected in the Instructional Quality Assessment (Matsumura, Garnier, Pascal & Valdes, 2002)), scores on the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), a licensing assessment, and value-added measures based on California Standards Test scores. The paper briefly describes each of these measures, their research base, and challenges associated with data collection.

Teacher educators have designed methods coursework for residents and mentors around two of these eight measures—the observation protocol and the logs of assessment practices. We contrast the formative value of these program-developed measures with the challenges of ensuring these measures have research value, are valid and reliable, and can be meaningfully analyzed alongside the other five measures. We also examine the potential of research-based measures such as the Instructional Quality Assessment to inform the program and subsequent induction support when residents become full-time teachers of record.

Authors

• Karen Hunter Quartz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jarod N. Kawasaki, University of California - Los Angeles

• Nichole Rivera, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jia Wang, University of California - Los Angeles