Fidelity of summative performance assessment in initial teacher education: The intersection of standardisation and authenticity

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses a major reform driven by the Australian Government requiring initial teacher education providers to implement a validated final year teaching performance assessment, commencing 2019. It is in this context of introducing a new high-stakes, culminating assessment of beginning teacher competence that the concept of assessment fidelity emerged as a significant research and practice issue within a national consortium of universities trialling the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA). A large corpus of recorded talk of experienced teacher educators collected during the 2017 trial of the GTPA was analysed to identify and examine these conditions as well as risks. The analysis drew on Gee’s notion of “identity” for examining situated meaning, and Fairclough’s concepts of discourse, sociocultural practice and materiality, understood as interrelated. Understanding risks to fidelity is foundational to establishing the upper limits of the validity of an assessment and thus the defensibility of any claims made in relation to a performance on the assessment. With TPAs being positioned as a gatekeeper to graduation and work as a teacher, it is important that there is confidence in the assessment to generate evidence of competence.

KEYWORDS:

• Fidelity
• teaching performance assessment
• graduate professional standards
• initial teacher education
• teacher competence
• authenticity
• standardisation

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the teacher educators who willingly and openly discussed their practice in an effort to implement the first approved Australian Teaching Performance Assessment, meeting both system and site requirements and with the overarching goal to best support their pre-service teachers.

Ethics statement

Ethical consent was obtained through the Australian Catholic University Ethics Committee (2017-101H) torecord meetings, and all participants signed consent forms. At the commencement of each meeting, members were reminded that recording would be occurring and were provided with an opportunity to indicate concerns regarding the recording and participation. No matters were raised in any of the meetings.

Correction Statement

The GTPA™ is copyrighted to the Australian Catholic University.

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Information on PACT and edTPA can be found at https://scale.stanford.edu/teaching. Further information regarding the implementation, impact and evolution of PACT and edTPA can be found at Reagan, Schram, McCurdy, Chang, and Evans (2016).

2. The term “dependability” is used by Harlen (2005) to refer to the interaction between the validity and reliability of an assessment as these relate to the assessment purpose.

3. The authors recognise that other agencies are involved in teacher education, but these are not the immediate focus of this paper. These agencies include jurisdictions or state and territory education authorities responsible for recruiting teachers, and state accreditation authorities which accredit initial teacher education programs, in cooperation with the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL).

4. The scoring rubric for determining the overall standard of the work as Meeting or Not Meeting the Expected Standard is provided to the pre-service teacher prior to undertaking the assessment.

5. The Trial involved other meetings of participating teacher educators, though these are not the focus of this paper.

6. The talk segments are identified by the date of the meeting, and the page and line numbers from the transcript for that meeting: [date, page, line number]. Reference is not made to any individuals, universities or organisations.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported here was supported by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) as well as contributions from the Queensland College of Teachers, the Australian Catholic University and Consortium Universities.

Notes on contributors

Lenore Adie

Lenore Adie is Associate Professor in Teacher Education and Assessment and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, ACU.

Claire Wyatt-Smith

Claire Wyatt-Smith is Director of the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, ACU and Professor of Educational Assessment and Literacy.