Beyond the Scores: Using Candidate Responses on High Stakes Performance Assessment to Inform Teacher Preparation for English Learners

Assessing the preparation of preservice candidates for quality teaching, both for mainstream students and for ELs, requires reliable and valid assessments that pay close attention to context, process, and reflection, factors that traditional evaluations of teaching either ignore or undervalue. In this article, the authors focus on one high-stakes preservice teacher performance assessment designed to meet these guidelines. The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), currently used in 32 teacher preparation programs throughout California, is a comprehensive assessment of knowledge and skills in which candidates analyze and reflect on their own instruction and their students\u27 learning during a Teaching Event in their student teaching placements. The authors document how eight elementary teacher candidates from teacher preparation programs throughout California discussed issues related to language and learning for ELs in their extensive written materials about their teaching and their students\u27 learning submitted as part of their PACT Teaching Events. While candidates for elementary credentials can choose to complete a mathematics or a language arts/literacy Teaching Event, the authors focused on those candidates who chose mathematics. The authors focus on mathematics because it is often misunderstood to be a language-free endeavor and because it represents an area in which schools have failed many ELs and other students from non-dominant linguistic backgrounds. The authors argue that the PACT, beyond its function as a high stakes examination used for state licensing decisions, has the potential to provide important information that can serve as formative assessment and feedback for teacher candidates themselves, individual teacher educators, and teacher education programs as a whole

Validating the internal structure of the Performance Assessment of California Teachers (PACT): A multi-dimensional item response model study

Examining a large sample of teacher candidate responses (n=1711), we found a sufficient degree of internal structure validity evidence to support the intended, continued use of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (2008) instrument to measure teacher candidates’ skills and proficiencies with professional standards in teaching (CCTC, 2012). Our examination of the Elementary Literacy Teaching Event found that the unidimensional IRT model fits the data very well and results in high reliability (.914), which is reassuring given the dependence on raters, the varied nature of the portfolio submissions and types of tasks, and the differences in California teacher preparation programs and their candidates. Further multi-dimensional analyses revealed two distinct constructs related to the Teaching Event with implications for pre-service preparation