TEAC expects program faculty to provide (1) a rationale justifying its claims that the assessment techniques it uses are reasonable and credible, and (2) evidence documenting the reliability and validity of the assessments.

Rationale. TEAC requires the program faculty to provide this rationale because the reliability and validity of nearly all the currently available methods for assessing students’ caring and learning are flawed and compromised in one way or another.

Because no single measure can be trusted to accurately reveal student learning, the program faculty will also need to employ multiple measures and assessment methods to achieve a dependable finding about what the candidates have learned.

However the program faculty members assess what their students have learned from the teacher education program, TEAC requires the program to provide evidence that the inferences made from the assessment system meet the appropriate and accepted research standards for reliability and validity.

This requirement means that the faculty will need to (1) address and rule out competing and rival inferences for the evidence of student learning; and (2) establish a point at which the evidence for their inference is sufficient, clear and consistent, and below which the evidence for their inference is insufficient, flawed, or inconsistent.

Evidence of validity. Because the evidence currently available to support claims of student learning is largely suggestive and not particularly compelling, to satisfy TEAC’s Quality Principle II, the program faculty needs to have an ongoing investigation of the means by which it provides evidence for each component of Quality Principle I.

The program faculty’s investigation must focus on two aspects of its assessment of student learning: (1) the links with the program’s design, the program’s goal, and the faculty’s claims made in support of the program goal; and (2) the elimination of confounding factors associated with the evidence from which the faculty draws the inferences.

2.1 Rationale for the links

TEAC requires that the faculty members have a rationale for their assessments that makes reasonable and credible the links between the assessments and (1) the program goal, (2) the program faculty’s claims about student learning, and (3) the program’s features.

For example, the faculty members who claim that their program prepares reflective practitioners would need to make a case that their ways of assessing reflective practice are reasonable and logical. They would need to show how their assessments are related conceptually to teacher competence and to some program requirements, and that the inferences they hope to make from their assessments could be expected to be valid.

2.2 Evidence of valid assessment

To satisfy Quality Principle II, the faculty must satisfy itself and TEAC that its rationale and the inferences from its assessments are also credible empirically. TEAC requires empirical evidence about the trustworthiness, reliability, and validity of the assessment method, or methods, the faculty employs.

To continue the example above, before the faculty members could conclude that their graduates are reflective practitioners, they would also need a way to be sure that they had ruled out some plausible alternative inferences based on the evidence from their assessments: for example, the inference that their graduates were simply following some template or formula; had guessed; had memorized or parroted their reflective responses; had copied their reflections from some source; or had fabricated the evidence of reflection.

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