Poster #37 - Confirmatory Factor Analysis of a Student Teaching Assessment Tool

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Evaluating student teachers and providing constructive feedback is imperative for ensuring the quality of our future educators. Creating a standardized evaluation tool across teacher prep programs would be informative for supervisors, cooperating teachers, and student teachers. This tool could also serve for program assessment and improvement. The current study proposes a student teaching evaluation tool based on ten core teaching standard developed by the Interstate Teaching Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) and a confirmatory factor analysis to determine whether the data fit the proposed model.

Research Purpose
The purpose of this study was to use confirmatory factor analysis to determine whether the sample data from the created student teaching evaluation tool was a good fit for the ten factor model of the InTASC standards.

Method:
Between Fall 2019 and Fall 2021, 895 (147 to 2220 per semester) cooperating teachers (CT) completed a Qualitrix survey to rate the effectiveness of their student teachers (ST) at the end of the semester. The survey included 55 questions rated on a scale of 1 (beginning) to 4 (highly effective) with five to eight questions for each of the ten InTASC standards. Table 1 includes all of the items and their corresponding teaching standard. Items were created using language from the InTASC teaching standards developmental progression tables at level one. Further, the authors conducted a review of all program specific candidate evaluations for the teacher preparation programs in the college of education. After items were created, each teacher preparation program participated in a content analysis of the items.


Data Analysis and Results

Exploratory factor analysis was not necessary for this study because the ten factor structure was developed from InTASC. Instead, a confirmatory factory analysis was used to determine whether the sample data was a good fit to the proposed ten factor structure. After outliers were removed and sphericity confirmed, a weighted least squares estimator with a promax rotation to allow the factors to correlate tested for model fit in Mplus Version 8. Full information maximum likelihood was used to handle missing data.

Model fit indices indicated an excellent fit to the ten factor model proposed by InTASC, 2(1385) = 4421.26, p <0.0001. RMSEA = 0.05 95%CI [0.049 – 0.052], SRMR = 0 .03, CFI = 0.99, TLI = 0.99. Each of the model fit indices exceeded the criteria for good fit proposed by Hu and Bentler (1999)

Discussion
Evidence suggests that this student teaching evaluation fits a ten factor model that align with the ten InTASC standards. This standardized student teaching evaluation could be used for educator preparation programs to self-assess and could be a valuable source of information for cooperating teachers to provide feedback to student teachers and begin the conversation to improve and remediate.

Authors

• Jenni Petersen, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater
  Presenting Author

• Scott Peters

• Katie Casey

• Lana Collet-Klingenberg