Appendix E: Inventory of evidence

Using the inventory
What evidence does the program have to support its claims that its graduates are competent, caring, and qualified? On what evidence does the program rely to assess its own progress toward the goal of preparing competent, caring, and qualified educators?

Early in the process of preparing to write the Inquiry Brief, program faculty should complete the inventory (see form, below) as a way of taking stock: the program faculty asks, What is the status of the evidence? What measures and indicators for TEAC Quality Principle I are available to the program? What evidence is available to the program? What does the faculty rely on? What might the program need to collect? What does it choose to rely on?

Later in the process, the completed form becomes Appendix E of the Brief. TEAC’s auditors are required to verify and find any evidence, whether reported or not in the Brief, that can corroborate or disconfirm the evidence that is cited in the Brief. The inventory that makes up Appendix E assists them in their work and makes their on-site audit more efficient and productive.

What evidence should we use?
In supporting its claims that the program meets TEAC’s quality principles, program faculty members are free to make their case for Quality Principle I with only the evidence on which the program truly relies. Not all the categories of evidence listed in the inventory may be relevant or useful to the program faculty. However, faculty must fully report all the available evidence that bears on its claims or that it has reported elsewhere in support of the quality of the program.

In the spirit of open inquiry, faculty must examine and explain all the evidence available to it that bears on the TEAC quality principles. However, if some evidence is not supportive of the program’s claims, or seems to be unsupportive, the faculty would make the case, like any other research group, that the contrary evidence should not be relied on for various reasons.

Thus, TEAC expects that any assessment results related to TEAC Quality Principle I that the program faculty uses elsewhere will be included in the Inquiry Brief. For example, evidence that is reported to the institution or state licensing authorities, or alluded to in publications, Web sites, catalogs, and the like must be included in the Inquiry Brief. Title II results, grades (if they are used for graduation, transfer, admission), admission test results (if they are used), hiring rates (if they are reported elsewhere) would all be included in the Brief.

Available evidence that is not cited elsewhere or used in decisions, placements and the like, and which the program does not use to support its claims can simply be identified as both “Available” and “Not used in the Brief.”

Although program faculty may be making its case for student learning with several novel measures, it will also need to disclose all the measures available to it, such as the grades the students have earned, the results of the state’s license test that is reported for Title II, and the results of any admission tests the institution requires. The faculty may hold these measures in low regard and see each as problematic for several reasons. If it does, the faculty would simply indicate that the measure was available, but that it was investigated and found to be problematic because it was unreliable or invalid for the program.

Some forms of evidence listed in the inventory may be perfectly acceptable to the faculty, but the evidence is currently unavailable. In that case, the faculty would indicate that the evidence is unavailable at the current time, but not problematic and that it may employ the evidence in the future. Or, the faculty may indicate that some evidence is both unavailable at the present time and so problematic that the faculty would not propose to examine it at any time in the future. The inventory affords the faculty the opportunity to indicate any of these possibilities with regard to each form of evidence (or any other forms of evidence) the faculty may wish to consider.