Assessing Student Primary Teachers' Use of High-Leverage Practices at Scale

• In Event: 72.044 - Teaching Simulations That Assess (the Use of) Teaching Knowledge and Skill

Abstract

Objectives
The goal was to create a summative assessment, inspired by the medical objective structured clinical examination (e.g. Schoonheim-Klein et al., 2009), where over 110 teacher candidates could demonstrate their ability to enact four high leverage practices of teaching with elementary school students in a way that is consistent and fair for teacher candidates and manageable for the institution.

Perspective(s)
Three practices were high leverage practices identified by Teaching Works (Davis & Boerst, 2014; Teaching Works, 2013): making content explicit through explanation, modeling, representations and examples; leading a whole class discussion; and setting up and managing small group work. The fourth practice was identified locally as a priority: introducing or consolidating content through storytelling.

Methods
In the assessment teacher candidates chose a topic in one or more curriculum subjects, and prepared and taught a twenty-minute lesson based on the topic. The lesson had to incorporate each of the four high leverage practices. The lesson was taught to a group of between five and fifteen third/fourth grade students, who were assembled specifically for the assessment. A trained assessor observed the lesson being taught and identified the presence or absence of pre-defined elements of each of the four practices. The children were distributed among eleven classrooms and each group of children was taught 20-minute lessons consecutively by ten teacher candidates.

Data sources
The paper uses a mixed methods approach and analyzes views of faculty and students on the course in the first two years of implementation and assessment data from two cohorts of student teachers.

Results
Initial results indicate that the benefits of the assessment include:
• Teacher candidates practice in a controlled environment what teachers do in their daily work making this form of assessment more authentic (Darling-Hammon & Wentworth, 2010) than alternative assessments which are further removed from the practice of teaching.

• The class size, the classroom, and the assessment requirements are designed to create greater consistency of context for students than would be the case on regular student-teacher internships. Consistency of context makes it feasible to require student teachers to meet specific and detailed requirements when demonstrating their command of the high leverage practices.

Among the challenges of this course assessment are the following:
• The assessment is more expensive and more logistically challenging than other courses because of the need for to recruit and train several assessors and to recruit many students.

• Setting a pass level – defining the minimum number of elements overall and elements associated with each practice – for the assessment has been difficult. Establishing the validity of the assessment (e.g. Selim, Ramadan, El-Gueneidy, & Gaafer, 2012) is a challenge.

• With ten assessors involved, establishing reliability of assessment is a challenge for this high-stakes assessment. An advance training session and a moderating assessor have been used to date.

Significance of the work
The work contributes to the growing literature on the practice of teaching and in particular to the validity and reliability of assessments of prospective teachers' preparedness to teach which are high stakes in nature.

Authors

• Sean F. Delaney, Marino Institute of Education

• Annie Ó Breacháin, Marino Institute of Education

• Suzy Macken, Marino Institute of Education