The past two days I shared time at the Westin Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, with several educators from across the nation in a training to learn to evaluate performance assessments for teacher candidates. Specifically I was trained in the area of science performance assessments. There were participants in the science training from Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington and Massachusetts. I was excited to meet another Iowa, Ted Neal, from the University of Iowa. Although the two of us have many questions as to how this will roll out in the state, we were both pleased to consider that we may be able to train others together as a team.
The TPA is currently in the field test stage. Accelerated states such as Minnesota, Washington and Ohio are already beginning to embed the prompts and rubrics into their course work and anticipate scoring these yet this spring. Once results from this field test are analyzed, the information will be used to revise the documents and "finalize" TPA materials for a pilot study.
The trainer in Science was Fred Freking from USC. He is quite experienced with the PACT (Performance Assessment of California Teachers) and did a good job of overviewing our tasks as trainers. It seems that two key things to keep in mind when scoring are: seeking evidence and then determining a preponderance of the evidence. We noticed how easily our biases came into play and continually found ourselves being reminded to look for evidence in the narrative and the videos.
The process consisted of starting with reviewed/scored rubrics (benchmarks) and comparing our scoring of the evidence to determine a match. We began with a benchmark of 2 on Thursday. Then today we completed the 1 and 3 benchmarks. There are 11 components that are reviewed on the TPA, all on a 4 point scale where a one is a "failing' mark and will need to be re-scored and then potentially revised by the teacher candidate. Now that we have been trained, our next step is to be calibrated. We will have two weeks within which to complete the calibration process. It is estimated that scoring a TPA will take between 2-5 hours. To be successful our marks must match the reviewers in 6 of 11 rubrics and the others must not be off by more than one.
The 11 rubric components are as follows: 3 in Planning, 3 in Instruction, 2 in Assessment, 1 in Reflection and 2 in Academic Language. The process is still a bit raw and rough and as long as I continued to remind myself of that, I was OK. Part of the problem is that we are dealing with TPA rubrics and PACT portfolios as the TPA portfolios and benchmarks do not yet exist. Hopefully these will be available by October 2011.
The burning questions that I have include:
- will these TPAs be used by candidates and candidate preparation programs to inform improvement or are they a glorified hoop jumping process
- there appears to be a bit of disconnect in the rubrics yet between "next steps" taken that inform instruction (formative assessment) and "next time" I teach I would do such and such different
- is this a fair form to use if this eventually gets tied to teacher pay
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