Study On Value-added Assessment Of Teacher Preparation Programs In United States

Pursuing education excellence is the main theme of education reform in the era of knowledge economy.What we can find from the phenomenon that accountability has become frequently used words in education policy and literature is governments and schools are eager to demonstrate the effectiveness of public education.Teachers and pre-service teachers training serve as the important school factor to guarantee education quality and the source to deliver new teachers to public education system respectively,therefore trend of strengthening accountability overflows to teacher education evaluation field.What kind of evaluation method is effective to demonstrate that teacher education supplies eligible teachers to public education system has become the focus of attention of many countries.Under such context,teacher education evaluation moves toward the trend characterized by outcome-oriented and evidence-based.Of current kinds of evaluation methods,value-added assessment method with the core of measuring difference between output and input pays attention to outcome of education activities as well as provides objective evaluation results.Since the turn of the century,value-added assessment became a favored method in teacher education evaluation field.Our country hasn't constructed specific evaluation methods on teacher education,systematically studying the emerging evaluation method in foreign country's teacher education evaluation field--value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs,has profound meaning for establishing our country's teacher education evaluation system.This thesis chooses America-the country implementing value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs earlier,as the study object,in order to illuminate value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs' implementation background,analyse it's basic logic and implement process,summarize it's characteristics and challenges it has faced,and put forward some thoughts.Research methods used in this thesis include document analysis and case analysis.Analyzing current policy orientation of America's value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs and background why governments push value-added assessment via collecting relevant policy documents,clarifying it's implement mechanism via collecting value-added assessment reports of state universities and concluding the results it has achieved and the disputes it has faced.State of Louisiana is taken as the case to be analyzed,the first state to implement value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs.Through studying value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs systematically,value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs emerging in the area of America's teacher education assessment is the product of various factors.Teacher preparation in United States has faced dual pressure from internal quality improvement and external accountability,traditional evaluation methods can't respond to intensive accountability requirements.Besides,the development of data systems and analysis methods,and widely implement of teacher value-added assessment create feasibility and lay the foundation of value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs.Value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs achieves factor separation of three levels(teacher preparation programs,teachers' teaching efficacy,students' learning outcomes)via regression analysis,and makes casual inference based on the regression analysis in order to fulfill the ultimate aim of judging the contribution teacher preparation program makes to students' learning outcomes.To some extent,value-added assessment of teacher preparation programs has realized the function of measuring programs' efficacy;and has characteristics of providing common metric to measure program' efficacy,playing the role of filter and creating equal evaluation environment;but meanwhile it has faced many challenges from various voices,such as reliability and validity,scope of application,applicableness of taking students' standardized test scores as indicators as well as intuition of assessment results.