There have been rumblings for the last couple of years about a new “bar-exam” for teachers entering the teaching profession, which this blog has discussed here and here and here.
The organization that is spearheading one of the chief candidates to fill the void of more rigorous teacher licensing tests is the edTPA. The edTPA has been created by Stanford University, and the testing would be carried out by Pearson. At its recent launch after a 2012-13 field test of some 4,000 teacher candidates, edTPA, which is also supported by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, was hailed for the clarity of its preliminary findings:
- Candidate scores were highest in secondary science and lowest in middle school mathematics; secondary teacher candidates tended to do better than elementary teachers overall.
- Candidates had the highest scores on the lesson-planning segment of the exam and the lowest on using assessment data to tailor instruction.
- Each exam is scored by two readers, and generally they agreed on what score the candidate merited.
- Analyses showed that the exam was strongly aligned with the content it sought to measure.
It is not clear how the results of this test might correlate to student improvement, but there is also a lack of clarity in terms of the connection between current teacher performance in certification programs or on current teacher certification tests with student improvement. In other words, compared to the void that is currently present, the lack of conclusions to be drawn about edTPA is not concerning.
Another question for states will be how high to set the bar for the new exam. A new report by the Stanford Center on Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) recommendeds that states not set a passing bar higher than 42 out of 75 total points—a cutoff point that would allow only 58 percent of candidates to pass on their first try.
Seven states—Hawaii, Washington, Minnesota, New York, Tennessee, Georgia, and Wisconsin—have formally committed to using the edTPA for certification or to gauge the quality of teacher-preparation programs; four other states are considering adopting it. (Twenty-two other states and jurisdictions have individual programs that have piloted the test.)
For more information, please visit: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2013/11/group_recommends_score_on_mult.html
