What Contributes to Being a Good ‘Assessor’? Predicting Student Teachers’ Competence in Educational Assessment by Personality, Socio-Demographic and Biographic Variables.

Author(s):

Christoph Schneider(presenting / submitting)Rainer Bodensohn(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 04 C, Developing Teacher Competencies: The role of beliefs, values and goals

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

09:00-10:30

Room:

K1.04 Auditorium 3

Chair:

Alan Huang

Contribution

Although teachers’ competence in educational assessment has been named as a key feature for succeeding in the teaching profession (e.g. DeLuca, LaPointe-McEwan & Luhanga, 2016), it is addressed relatively incidentally in overall systematizations of teacher competences on an international scale (cf. European Commission, 2013). This is even more noteworthy as assessment, in an educational context, goes beyond the mere evaluation of pupils’ achievements and learning outcomes in a summative way. Inherently, teachers’ assessment activities also encompass providing feedback to pupils and, in consequence, enhancing the pupils’ learning process itself. ‘Assessment for Learning’ (e.g. Black, 2015) is a term underscoring the strong formative component of assessment activities in an educational context. The manifold and complex nature of assessment in education has recently been depicted in a cross-country review of respective standard collections (DeLuca et al., 2016).

The specific aim of this paper is to investigate whether selected personality traits, socio-demographic and biographic variables allow for a prediction of student teachers’ assessment competence and its development. Hereto, a sample of N = 931 student teachers at a German university was monitored in longitudinal research design. A potential benefit of the empirical identification of personal variables predicting competence may refer to individual career counselling for (future) teacher candidates either in a prospective or a formative way.

In Germany, binding standards for teacher education have been issued by the Standing Conference of Cultural Ministers (KMK, 2004/2014), the country’s highest level institution of policymakers in education. The KMK’s standards list competences teachers are supposed to possess upon completing teacher education (and which may be still be fostered in tertiary teacher education) in the four broad competence domains of “Teaching”, “Education”, “Assessment” and “Innovation”. In this framework, thus, assessment competence is granted a relatively prominent position including both, summative and formative aspects.

Systematizations of teachers’ competences in the form of standard catalogues may, however, only provide normative visions or outcome expectations of competences teachers are thought to possess or, in turn, student teachers are thought to develop during their teacher education. In order to evaluate the (desired) outcomes of teacher education structures, empirically “assessing the development of teachers’ competences, with tools that are aligned with the purpose and design of the teacher competence model being used in each system” (European Commission, 2013, p.34) is thus a necessary demand.

To meet this requirement specifically in the German teacher education context, student teachers’ competences in the domains of “Teaching”, “Education”, “Assessment” and “Innovation” (as proposed by the KMK’s standards) were evaluated in the KOSTA (acronym for Competence and Standard Orientation in Teacher Education) project. KOSTA’s longitudinal design included a questionnaire survey at the beginning of teacher education and two assessments of student teachers’ competence in the four domains during the university-based phase of initial teacher education. Each of the two assessments followed a compulsory in-school practicum which provided the basis of reflection upon the competences. Following the notion that the concrete situation inside the practicums exact student teachers’ competent behaviour, competence was assessed by self-ratings of the frequency with which behaviour in accordance with the standards was applied during the practicums. KOSTA ran from 2007 to 2013 and generated two independent databases (KOSTA I, N = 429 and KOSTA II, N = 931).

Method

Earlier findings involving Latent Change Analyses (LCA) on KOSTA I data indicate that, during teacher education, student teachers’ self-rated competence increases significantly in the “Teaching” and “Innovation” domains, but not in “Education” (Schneider & Bodensohn, 2014). Furthermore, in predicting a shift in competence by personality traits assessed at the beginning of teacher education, “self-efficacy expectancy” (SEE; Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1999) was the dominant predictor for competence development across the domains of “Teaching”, “Education” and “Innovation” (Schneider, Bodensohn & Foerster, 2014). However, due to problems in latent variable modelling in “Assessment”, this domain had to be excluded from analysis in KOSTA I. Following an empirical approach in generating adequate indicators for assessment competence, analysis of this domain became feasible with KOSTA II data. Analyses revealed that also concerning “Assessment”, student teachers’ competence increases significantly in the course of teacher education (Schneider & Bodensohn, under review). A question yet to be answered specifically for “Assessment” is whether student teachers’ personality features, socio-demographic and/or biographic variables allow for a prediction of (a) the magnitude of assessment competence and (b) its longitudinal development. Personality traits included in these analyses were “stability” (as the opposed pole to neuroticism), “extraversion” and “conscientiousness” from the Big Five model (e.g. McCrae & John, 1992), SEE, measures of Personal Competence (PC; e.g. “sense of duty”, “curiosity” or “empathy”; Frey, 2008), Action vs. State Orientation (“preoccupation”, “hesitation” and “volatility”; Kuhl, 1994) as well as intrinsic and extrinsic study motivation. Sociodemographic and biographic variables included age, gender, activities before enrolling in teacher education (e.g. social service, vocational training or university studies other than teacher education) and previous pedagogical experiences with children and youths. In generating regression models with multiple predictors, we first analysed all predictor variables separately, rank-ordered them by their standardized effects (beta) on the criterion and then subsequently included them into multiple prediction models. A predictor was kept in the model while its effect on the criterion was statistically significant (p < .05). Modelling came to a halt when no further predictor reached significance. This modelling strategy was repeated in predicting (a) the latent variable of the initial magnitude of the self-rated assessment competence and (b) the latent change parameter indicative of a longitudinal shift in this competence. Thus, our design allowed identifying factors contributing to (a) the magnitude of the self-rated assessment competence and (b) the disposition to effectively develop this competence during teacher education.

Expected Outcomes

In predicting (a) the assessment competence at a relatively early stage in teacher education, a number of variables had significant effects in the single predictor analyses. In descending order, the strongest predictors were “curiosity” and “success orientation” (aspects of PC), the “hesitation” subscale of Action vs. State Orientation (with a negative effect, i.e. low hesitation is a predictor), intrinsic study motivation, “sense of duty” and “empathy” (PC), SEE and a measure of the frequency with which candidates had been engaged in pedagogical activities with children. Other potential predictors had considerably lower effects (e. g. “conscientiousness” and “stability”) or no effects (e. g. age, gender and extrinsic motivation). As there is redundancy in the predictors, however, multiple predictor modelling is required to identify the dominant predictors. Here, only “curiosity”, (lack of) “hesitation”, intrinsic study motivation and prior pedagogical experiences remained as significant predictors, in total accounting for 7.0 % of criterion variance. In predicting (b) the development in assessment competence, fewer single predictors had significant effects and in the multiple analyses, only (lack of) “hesitation” remained significant, explaining just 1.0 % of variance. Taken together, these findings suggest that while open-minded (“curious”), action-oriented (not “hesitating”), intrinsically motivated student teachers, ideally having engaged in pedagogical activities with children, tend to assign themselves higher assessment competence, the relatively low proportion of variance explained leaves much room for other factors influencing assessment competence. Finally, it should be pointed out, that unlike in the other domains of teacher competence, SEE is not a dominant predictor for assessment competence. Potential implications of these findings will be discussed.

References

Black, P. (2015). Formative assessment: An optimistic but incomplete vision. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 22(1), 161–177. doi:10.1080/0969594X.2014.999643 DeLuca, C., LaPointe-McEwan, D., & Luhanga, U. (2016). Teacher assessment literacy: A review of international standards and measures. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 28(3), 251–272. doi:10.1007/s11092-015-9233-6 European Commission. (2013). Supporting teacher competence development for better learning outcomes. Strasbourg. Retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/ repository/education/policy/school/doc/teachercomp_en.pdf Frey, A. (2008). Kompetenzstrukturen von Studierenden in der ersten und zweiten Phase der Lehrerbildung.: Eine nationale und internationale Standortbestimmung. Landau: Verlag Empirische Pädagogik. KMK (Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland). (2004/2014). Standards für die Lehrerbildung: Bildungswissenschaften. Retrieved from http://www.kmk.org/fileadmin/Dateien/veroeffentlichungen_beschluesse/2004/2004_12_16-Standards-Lehrerbildung-Bildungswissenschaften.pdf Kuhl, J. (1994). Action versus state orientation: Psychometric properties of the Action Control Scale (ACS-90). In J. Kuhl & J. Beckmann (Eds.), Volition and Personality. Action Versus State Orientation (pp. 47–59). Seattle: Hogrefe & Huber Publishers. McCrae, R. R., & John, O. P. (1992). An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model and Its Applications. Journal of Personality, 60(2), 175–215. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00970.x Schneider, C., & Bodensohn, R. (2014). Core competences of students in university teacher education and their longitudinal development: First results of the KOSTA study. In K.-H. Arnold, A. Gröschner, & T. Hascher (Eds.), Pedagogical Field Experiences in Teacher Education: Theoretical Foundations, Programmes, Processes, and Effects (pp. 147–163). Münster: Waxmann. Schneider, C. & Bodensohn, R. (under review). Student teachers’ appraisal of the importance of assessment in teacher education and self-reports on the development of assessment competence. Schneider, C., Bodensohn, R., & Foerster, F. (2014, September). Does Personality Predict Student Teachers’ Longitudinal Competence Development?: Predicting Latent Change Within the KOSTA Project. Paper presented at the EERA/ECER conference, Porto, Portugal. Schwarzer, R., & Jerusalem, M. (Eds.). (1999). Skalen zur Erfassung von Lehrer- und Schülermerkmalen: Dokumentation der Psychometrischen Verfahren im Rahmen der Wissenschaftlichen Begleitung des Modellversuchs Selbstwirksame Schulen. Berlin: R. Schwarzer. Retrieved from http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~health/self/skalendoku_selbstwirksame_schulen.pdf

Author Information

Christoph Schneider (presenting / submitting)

University of Trier

Section for Teacher Education and Research

Trier

Rainer Bodensohn (presenting)

formerly University of Koblenz-Landau

Centre for Teacher Education, Campus Landau

Bad Bergzabern

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