Table Of Content“Professionalizing Teacher Education: Performance Assessment, Standards, Moderation,
and Evidence provides original, informative and significant insights into the
black box of the design, development, validation, standard setting and imple-
mentation of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA®) in
Australia, as well as an account of the innovative and distinctive approach
to cross-institutional standards-referenced moderation adopted. As such, this
book will be necessary reading for all those interested in authentic assess-
ment practices, in intelligent accountability, in teacher education reform and
in improving the status and professionalism of both teacher education and
teaching.”
Professor Bob Lingard PhD FASSA FAcSS,
Australian Catholic University
“This is an important book, providing an empirical response to the perennial
question: ‘What’s good enough for beginning teachers, and how would you
know?’ It draws substantially on a major national standard setting, bench-
marking, and moderation reform initiative. This is an impressive contribu-
tion to the international debate, theoretically grounded, and empirically
sophisticated.”
Bill Louden AM,
Emeritus Professor of Education,
University of Western Australia
PROFESSIONALIZING TEACHER
EDUCATION
This book provides a significant contribution to conversations about teacher qual-
ity and graduate readiness for teaching. It presents empirical insights into how a
multidisciplinary team of researchers, teacher educators, and policy personnel mobi-
lized for collective change in a standards-driven reform initiative. The insights are
research-informed and critically relevant for anyone interested in teacher prepara-
tion and credentialing. It gives an account of a bold move to install a collaborative
culture of evidence-informed inquiry to professionalize teacher education.
The centerpiece of the book is the use of standards and evidence to show the
quality of graduates entering the teaching workforce. The book presents, for the first
time, a model of online cross-institutional moderation as benchmarking to generate
large-scale evidence of the quality of teacher education. The book also introduces a
new conceptualization of a feedback loop using summative data for accountability
and formative data to inform curriculum review and program renewal.
This book offers the insider story of the conceptualization, design, and imple-
mentation of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA). It involves
going to scale with a large group of Australian universities, government agencies, and
schools, and using participatory approaches to advance new thinking about evidence-
informed inquiry, cross-institutional moderation, and innovative digital infrastructure.
The discussion of competence assessment, standards, and change processes pre-
sented in the book has relevance beyond teacher education to other professions.
Claire Wyatt-Smith (Ph.D.) is Professor of Educational Assessment and Measure-
ment and the Director of the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education,
Australian Catholic University. Her research focuses on standards, moderation, pro-
fessional judgment, and the implications of digital disruption for teacher profession-
alism. Current research includes a large-scale Australian study working with a national
Collective of universities on the design and implementation of the Graduate Teacher
Performance Assessment (GTPA). She has held leadership roles in universities and
schools in Australia and advisory roles internationally. She currently leads a longitu-
dinal quantitative analysis of the quality and impact of initial teacher education. She
has undertaken many large-scale studies with Australian Research Council and
other research consultancy funds. Her latest books with colleagues are Digital
Disruption in Teaching and Testing: Assessments, Big Data and the Transformation of
Schooling (2021, Routledge) and Teaching Performance Assessments as a Cultural
Disruptor in Initial Teacher Education: Standards, Evidence and Collaboration (2021,
Springer).
Lenore Adie (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Teacher Education and Assessment,
and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher
Education, Australian Catholic University. Her research focuses on assessment and
moderation processes as these contribute to quality assurance and improvement
purposes. Her research has generated new knowledge in the field of assessment,
focusing on quality in assessment practices and processes, in particular, within sys-
tems of standards-referenced assessment. She currently leads an Australian Research
Council project investigating the use of scaled annotated exemplars of achievement
standards in online moderation to improve teacher assessment capability. She has
extensive professional experience working in schools as a teacher and in leadership
positions, and in teacher education for over 30 years.
Michele Haynes (Ph.D.) is Professor of Data Analytics for Education Research at
the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Australian Catholic
University. She is an accredited statistician in Australia with extensive experience as
a statistical methodologist and innovator using longitudinal data for education
research. Michele has expertise in the estimation of complex models for social
applications using data from multiple sources, including panel surveys and adminis-
trative data.
Chantelle Day (Ph.D.) is Research Partnerships Manager at the Institute for
Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Australian Catholic University. A
significant priority within her portfolio includes management of the Institute’s
largest, longitudinal research project titled the Graduate Teacher Performance
Assessment: Standards and Moderation Project. Chantelle has experience in manag-
ing and supporting research projects involving various stakeholders and has worked
at the Institute since the completion of her doctoral studies in 2017. Chantelle’s
research expertise extends to the fields of equity and inclusion in higher education,
teacher education, and assessment.
PROFESSIONALIZING
TEACHER EDUCATION
Performance Assessment, Standards,
Moderation, and Evidence
Claire Wyatt-Smith, Lenore Adie,
Michele Haynes, and Chantelle Day
Cover image: © Abstract Aerial Art/Getty Images
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Claire Wyatt-Smith, Lenore Adie, Michele Haynes and Chantelle Day
The right of Claire Wyatt-Smith, Lenore Adie, Michele Haynes and Chantelle
Day to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-33213-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-33212-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-31850-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429318504
Typeset in Bembo
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
CONTENTS
List of figures xiii
List of tables xv
Foreword xvi
Acknowledgments xviii
List of contributors xx
List of abbreviations xxi
PART 1
Conceptualization, design, and implementation 1
1 Standards, large-scale evidence, professional judgment, and
the affordances of digital technologies in teacher education 3
Teacher education and issues of evidence and quality 3
A turntable of reviews into teacher education 7
The nature and function of standards in teacher education 12
The move to teaching performance assessments 13
The turn to standards, evidence, and quality through competence
assessment 15
Overview of chapters 19
Conclusion 21
Notes 22
References 22
2 The move to assessing competence in professions 29
Introduction 29
Measuring complex assessments of professional competence 30
Performance assessments 31
viii Contents
Examples of performance assessments for determining
professional competence and licensure 34
Performance assessments in initial teacher education: Examples
from the United States 38
Performance assessments in Australian teacher education:
The relationship between competence and readiness 41
Conclusion 42
Notes 43
References 43
3 Three essential features in a new conceptualization of
complex performance assessments: Authenticity, system
and site validity, and intelligent accountability 48
Introduction 48
Authenticity as a design feature of complex
performance assessment 49
System and site validity as a design feature of complex
performance assessment 52
Intelligent accountability as a design feature of complex
performance assessment 54
Designing the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment
(GTPA) for authenticity, system and site validity, and
intelligent accountability 57
Design principles of the GTPA 58
Conclusion 60
Notes 60
References 61
4 How do we know that teacher graduates are ready
for professional practice? Designing an assessment for
evidence of readiness 64
The move to teaching performance assessments 64
The Australian context for assessing professional competence
and readiness for teaching 65
A strengthened role for standards, evidence, and benchmarking 68
Designing the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA) 72
The first cycle of the literature review: Conceptualization
and content validity 73
The second cycle of the literature review: Constructs of
teaching 76
Standards and the design of the GTPA scoring rubric 79
Expert review 80
Conclusion 83
Contents ix
Note 84
References 84
5 Teaching Performance Assessments and
Considerations of Fairness 90
Joy Cumming and Diana Pullin
Introduction 90
Fairness principles 91
Fairness by ensuring the technical quality of the assessment 92
Validity standards 93
Reliability standards 94
Standard setting and scoring 94
Treatment of special populations 95
Opportunity to learn 96
Other fairness considerations 98
Assessing fairness of the GTPA 99
Applying the fairness principles to the GTPA 99
Effectiveness principles 99
Assessing effectiveness of the GTPA 100
Conclusion 101
Notes 101
References 102
PART 2
Data analytics, systems thinking, and digital architecture 107
6 Validation, reliability, and standard setting in the GTPA:
A focus on methodologies and judgment 109
Introduction 109
Introducing Study 1 and Study 2: A focus on methodologies 111
Processes and methods 113
Study 1: Consistency in judgment and criteria discrimination 114
Study 1.1: Establishing the judgment process 116
Study 1.2: Moderation to support judgment consistency 117
Analytic strategy 118
Results from Study 1 118
Study 2: Setting the standard with pairwise comparison
methodology 121
Study 2.1: Pairwise comparison of GTPA samples 121
Study 2.2: Setting the standard with exemplars of the
minimum acceptable level 122
Analytic Strategy 123
