CTE Teacher Licensure and Long-Term Student Outcomes

We use longitudinal data from Massachusetts that link high school course-taking records in career and technical education (CTE) to postsecondary student outcomes to provide the first empirical evidence linking characteristics of CTE teachers to later student outcomes. We find that CTE teachers who received better scores on subject performance tests required for licensure tend to have students with higher longer-term earnings than CTE teachers who received lower scores on these tests, controlling for other factors. Specifically, we estimate that a 1 standard deviation increase in teacher performance on these tests is associated with about a $1,000 increase in average expected earnings for the teacher's students 5 years after their expected graduation date, controlling for licensure test area and observable differences between students.

The validity of a performance based assessment for aspiring school leaders

This paper introduces the new Massachusetts Performance Assessment for Leaders (PAL) and uses critical policy analysis to re-examine the validity evidence (using the 2014 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing and a theory of multicultural validity) for the use and interpretation of the PAL in regards to emerging school leadership. Data sources include two years of PAL test documentation plus candidate surveys and interviews with program directors. The author’s role as a test user, faculty instructor, and certified test scorer afforded access to student work, student communications, scorer network training, and state department of education communications and meetings. The paper challenges the content validity, raises questions in regards to evidence based on response processes, internal structure, relation to other variables, consequences, and multicultural validity particularly when the PAL is used as a stand-alone, high-stakes licensure test and offers suggestions to improve the test as a formative assessment.

Using Online Gaming as a Teacher Test Prep Model for Mathematics

In 2015, North Carolina's Division of Teacher Licensure instituted a new licensure examination modeled after the MTel for all elementary education majors. With the new examination came a new minimum passing score of 227. The importance of having a thorough understanding of the mathematics content is expected, yet teacher preparation programs struggle to help elementary pre-service teacher candidates who enter undergraduate programs without the solid mathematics foundations needed to be successful in passing the North Carolina General Curriculum Mathematics Licensure test. With this problem serving as the backdrop, the purpose of this quantitative study was to examine if utilizing Lost Functions, an online gaming program developed by ATLT Gaming (2010), could serve as an innovative methodology to prepare teacher education candidates for the General Curriculum Mathematics Licensure test in elementary mathematics, possibly resulting in improved performance outcomes.

Performance of Senior Teacher Education Students in a Pre-Licensure Test for General Education

The Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET) covers General Education and Professional Education components for the Elementary level examination and the General Education, Professional Education and Specialization components for the Secondary level examination. The study developed a 100-item pre-licensure test on the General Education component of the Teacher Education curriculum. The study looked into the performance of the students in the examination per subject area. It also looked into the discrimination and difficulty indices to assess the validity and reliability of the items as instruments to measure achievement. The respondents covered all students who took the examination. The study used descriptive – evaluative design. The performance of the students was measured through the percentage of students who got the correct answer. The data were treated statistically using means, percentages, and ranking. Item analysis was done to determine the indices of difficulty and discrimination while Kuder Richardson 21 was computed to determine the reliability of the test. The examinees registered a High performance. The highest performance of the respondents was in the Filipino component while the least performance is in Science. The easiest items per percentage of correct responses were in Filipino and Social Science while the most difficult item is in Science. Close to half of the items are of moderate difficulty. Only a few items have satisfactory discrimination. The study recommended the improvement of the test particularly on the choices to improve the reliability of the test. Learning areas where students performed poorly should be given focus on the teaching of the general education subjects.