A History of Assessment in the College of Education

1980s Since at least the 1980s, students in the Elementary, Secondary, and Special Education departments have been required to take an exit exam for certification that is administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The name of the exam has changed over the years from Pennsylvania Teacher Certification Test to the National Teacher Education Test to what is now called "The Praxis."

1987 A group of Education faculty members from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Millersville University, and Slippery Rock University received a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant to do pre-teacher assessment. Dennis Fair (Special Education) and Patricia Zimmerman (Physical Education) from the College of Education and Human Service Professions (CEHSP) participated in this project through the late 1980s. The intention was to identify areas in which students entering teacher education needed to improve.

June 1996 Several College of Education (CE) faculty members attended an assessment workshop at Alverno College.

Fall 1996 The Elementary Education/Early Childhood department required its students to produce and orally present an exit portfolio. By the fall of 1998, the remaining three departments in the College had a similar requirement.

March 1998 Catherine Moresink (Dean, CE), John Hicks (Elementary Ed/Early Childhood), Carla Hart (Career Services) and others received a grant titled "Assessment of Students in the Professional Education Program" from the SSHE Planning Implementation Advisory Council. In April 1998, in connection with this grant, Charlotte Danielson of the Educational Testing Service spoke on assessment in teacher preparation programs. The grant authors of the proposal feel that SAT and PRAXIS (see above) standardized test scores are overemphasized as measures of student teaching quality. The grant is intended to develop a more appropriate way to meet the standards set by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). NCATE looks at admission criteria, the programs, and the exit survey. NCATE also has performance-based standards that they want institutions that prepare teachers to meet.

April 1998 Charlotte Danielson of the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ introduced "The Framework" to College of Education faculty. She presented ideas from her "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching" (here's a link to the first chapter). "The Framework" establishes rubrics for performance levels of the standards. In other words, by providing detailed descriptions of how graduating students should be able to perform, i.e., objectives for students to develop while at SRU, Danielson shows how to make the NCATE standards usable or operational. Her framework should enable the College of Education to collect data to revise their programs.