Examining the Psychometric Quality of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Early Childhood/Generalist Assessment System*

The purpose of the study was to examine the psychometric quality of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) Early Childhood/Generalist assessment system. Rating data from the 1997–1998 assessment were analyzed using the FACETS (Linacre, 1998) computer program. The assessment system's 10 exercises work together to define a unidimensional accomplished teaching variable. There is little evidence of multidimensionality in the data, and none of the exercises appear to function in a redundant manner. The exercise set succeeds in defining several statistically distinct levels of accomplished teaching among the candidates. Overall, most candidate rating profiles show consistent performance across the exercises. While assessors differed somewhat in severity, most used the 12-point rating scale consistently. Although the range in assessor variability tends to be moderate, assessor severity does influence the number of candidates that can bank individual exercises. (If a candidate's total scaled score does not meet or exceed the NBPTS performance standard of 275, the candidate can bank scores on exercises in which the candidate received a final score of 2.75 or greater. If the candidate reapplies for certification in the next three years, the candidate does not have to retake banked exercises.)     

Influences on Student Cognitions About Evaluation

Interviews on two occasions with 71 Grade 2, 4 and 6 students in a multi-ethnic setting in Toronto, Canada, found that student cognitions about evaluation mediated the relationship between evaluation and achievement. Parents, peers and student characteristics influenced student cognitions about evaluation. Parents identified the evaluation dimensions their children should attend to, raised student aspirations, stated how well student work attained standards and recommended actions children should take in response to the evaluation. Peer interpretations influenced whether a given performance was viewed as superior or inferior. Older student peers focused attention, to a greater extent than parents, on specific aspects of student performance that could be ameliorated through self-remediation. Children became more sophisticated evaluation consumers as they grew older. Females processed evaluation data more productively than males. There were few cultural differences in response to evaluation. Students responded to traditional and alternate evaluation in very similar ways.     

Using cognitive referents in making sense of teaching: A chemistry teacher's struggle to change assessment practices

This qualitative case study focused on the role of cognitive referents in the sense-making process of one teacher as he attempted to change his classroom science assessment. The interpretations identify cultural myths, conceptual metonymys, as well as personally constructed beliefs as referents that constrained change. The teacher's cognitive struggle to make sense of assessment and his role as assessor are linked to conflicting referents he used in varying contexts including day-to-day assessment and summative assessment settings. The results of the study suggest that cognitive referents are important influences in driving how a teacher thinks about assessment and may constrain an individual teacher's implementation of innovative practices. Accordingly, identification of referents such as myths, their associated beliefs, and metonymic conceptual models that teachers use to make sense of their actions is an important first step in developing an understanding of constraints to educational change.     

Indigenization and University Governance: Reflections from the Transition to Yukon University

Tertiary Education and Management - While literature on university governance in Canada has identified key challenges that need to be addressed, it largely overlooks calls for change towards...     

Opening the black box: user-log analyses of children’s e-Book reading and associations with word knowledge

Reading and Writing - Third to fifth graders read an interactive choose-your-own adventure e-Book. User logs recorded their reading behaviors and were used to investigate students’...     

The Discourses of Social Justice in Education

What the existing organization of schooling presupposes...is that in consumption terms, the world consists of equally powerful individual actors. Such, of course, is not the case in a hierarchically ordered capitalist system, where labour and capital, and indeed different forms of both, have differential access to resources enabling them to consume. By largely intervening only in provisional relations, the state fails to recognize the central dynamic of education ‐‐ that provision and consumption are not coterminous. In essence, state intervention does not go far enough. (Lynch, 1989, p.127)     

Relations among three aspects of first‐year college students' epistemologies of science

At the start of their first semester, 35 college freshmen were given an interview probing (a) their differentiation of scientists' ideas from evidence, and hypotheses from theories; (b) their understanding of the inherent uncertainty of scientific knowledge; and (c) their reasoning about scientific controversies. The most common responses were in terms of an epistemology in which scientists' ideas and evidence are differentiated, and theories are understood as tested hypotheses (Level 2 in our system based on Carey, Evans, Honda, Jay, & Unger, 1989), although students varied in how consistently they differentiated theories and evidence across all questions. Responses in which theories are understood as broader explanatory frameworks guiding hypothesis testing (Level 3) were virtually nonexistent, but some students gave responses that showed awareness of processes of interpreting and reinterpreting patterns of results (Level 2.5). Responses across the three parts of the interview were significantly related. Consistently differentiating scientists' ideas from evidence was strongly related to appreciating the inherent uncertainty of scientific knowledge and with having a deeper understanding of the reasons for scientific controversies and how to resolve them. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 747–785, 2006