Section archive - Assessment & Evaluation

In this study, the authors administered two instruments designed to assess and predict teacher effectiveness, the Teacherinsight Interview (TI) and the Renaissance Teacher Work Sample (TWS). The authors asked whether the TWS could serve as a significant predictor of the Tl score. The participants were 396 teacher candidates. This study showed that Praxis Principles of Learning and Teaching scores are significantly correlated with TWS score and TI score. Furthermore, certification level was significantly related to both TI and TWS total scores. However, a stepwise regression revealed only two variables -- certification level and Praxis PLT score -- as significant predictors of TI scores.

In this article, the authors are teacher educators who explore their own attempts to transform teacher–student relations by altering traditional grading practices. Using actor-network theory, the authors examine the social effects produced across and throughout a school of education when they changed the meaning and significance of grades. he findings reveal the deeply ingrained and broadly interconnected role that traditional understandings of grades play in defining and stabilizing identities and responsibilities.

The present paper is based on a project in which the author, as a critical friend, worked with six engineering teachers in a Masters program in Machine Engineering in order to stimulate their reflection on their own teaching and learning as a way of developing their scholarship of teaching. The purpose of the study is to investigate the author's values, beliefs and professional practices and how these might have been challenged or changed as a result of being a critical friend to the engineering teachers.

In this article, the author considers of what, conceptually, the evaluation design models might productively look like in the particular context of professional development (PD) in technology integration. The author describes and examines three PD programmes in New Zealand that formed the basis of the reflective review of evaluation in technology PD all had a technology focus. The author concludes that by placing participant teachers at their centre, models of PD based on action research have inherent potential to closely link both teacher effects and student outcomes directly back to aspects of the PD experience to provide a rich evidence base about those effects and outcomes from the participants’ perspective.