The Repository @ St. Cloud State

Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

5-2017

Culminating Project Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Educational Administration and Leadership, K-12: Ed.D.

Department

Educational Administration and Higher Education

College

School of Education

First Advisor

John Eller

Second Advisor

John Hoover

Third Advisor

Wendy Shannon

Fourth Advisor

Roger Worner

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Keywords and Subject Headings

Teacher Performance Assessment, Teaching Quality, Teacher Candidate, Teacher Education, Teacher Evaluation

Abstract

Nearly a decade after the 1983 landmark report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) initiated action to reform education in the United States and established five policy recommendations “aimed at ensuring powerful teaching and learning in all communities as America’s schools and children enter the 21st century” (NCTAF, 1996, p. 4). More specifically, NCTAF sought to reform teacher preparation, professional development, and teacher recruitment with the essential outcome of improved teaching quality and accountability (NCTAF, 1996). Increased teaching quality may have resulted in improved student learning (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015).

The national discourse on accountability of teacher preparation called for both teacher candidate essential knowledge and increased experiences in K-12 schools prior to entering the field as a new teacher (Hollins, 2011). The need for valid and reliable performance assessments, as a part of a system of multiple measures of teaching quality, provide critical information to preparation programs and state-level licensure officers has dominated accountability conversations (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Performance assessments such as the edTPA—developed collaboratively by teachers and teacher educators—represented the complexity of teaching and offered standards that have defined an expert profession (Darling-Hammond & Hyler, 2013).

Darling-Hammond (2010) noted, “[structured teacher performance assessments] have been found to be stronger predictors of teachers’ contributions to student learning gains than traditional teacher tests” (p.7). Possessing the ability to predict teaching quality in the profession by a teacher performance assessment during the pre-service phase of preparation offers exciting possibilities for the field. However, after an extensive review of the literature, no empirical research was discovered on the predictive validity of teaching quality by the edTPA.

Accompanying the edTPA as a measure of teaching quality in Minnesota, several institutions of higher education (IHE’s) in the Midwest have developed and implemented common metrics to evaluate, analyze, and improve teacher preparation programs. Specific to evaluating teaching quality in the field, the Common Metrics Supervisor Survey (CMSS) is administered to obtain a supervisor’s perception of a new teacher’s quality during the first year of teaching. Thus, in order to understand the relationship between the two valid and reliable measures of teaching quality, the study seeks to determine if the edTPA scores are predictive of CMSS results at the end of the first year of teaching.

Comments/Acknowledgements

Throughout my experience in St. Cloud State University’s (SCSU) K-12 Educational Administration and Leadership doctoral program, I have received a tremendous amount of encouragement and support from the SCSU faculty and my fellow Cohort VI members. The life-long friendships and professional connections I have made mean so much to me personally and professionally. I am a better husband, father, and educator as a result.

I would like to extend a special thank you to my dissertation committee comprised of Dr. John Eller, Dr. John Hoover, Dr. Wendy Shannon (WSU), and Dr. Roger Worner. I am forever grateful for your guidance and encouragement throughout this journey. I also want to thank my colleagues at Winona State University who continually offered encouragement and, most importantly, posed challenging questions to improve my study.

I wish to thank my immediate family—my father Guy Traver, mother LaDona Kollasch, and brother Collan Traver and his family—for offering encouragement and exhibiting patience and understanding as I worked to manage family and professional responsibilities.

To my children, Mae Elizabeth and “Baby T”: being your father is the greatest honor I could achieve. I am so excited for our future together. Finally and most importantly, I wish thank my wife, Katie—your unwavering love, support, and sacrifice provided the ability for me to focus on the dissertation journey. Words cannot express how much I love you.

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