Section 2: Claims & rationale
Section 2 of the Inquiry Brief contains two related parts: claims and rationale.
Claims
The program faculty asserts that the program’s graduates are competent, caring, and qualified professional educators (Quality Principle I, including cross-cutting themes).
In the second part, the program faculty provides a rationale for the assessments it uses to support its claims (Quality Principle II).
Claims are statements that a program faculty makes about the accomplishments of its students and graduates. The faculty supports its claims with evidence. Through the audit, TEAC then verifies the evidence. Indeed, the whole point of the TEAC accreditation process is to test whether the program’s claims are supported with evidence.
In making its claims, the program faculty describes the professional characteristics of its graduates, addressing each of the three components of Quality Principle I (student learning: subject matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, caring teaching skill) and the cross-cutting themes (learning to learn, multicultural perspectives, technology).
Note: Some claims may be written about students in the program while others may be written about graduates of the program. The latter is generally the better choice whenever possible because it is the graduates of the program about which TEAC and the public want to make inferences.
What claims are important to TEAC?
Claims and evidence and types of evidence
Formulating and formatting claims
Claims and state and national standards
Being consistent with public claims
Generating claims: three steps
Subsidiary claims throughout the Inquiry Brief
Rationale
The rationale for the assessments establishes the credibility of the assessments the faculty uses in supporting each claim associated with Quality Principle I, student learning. This rationale section of the Inquiry Brief makes a persuasive argument that shows how the program’s assessment procedures measure 1) the program’s goal of preparing competent, caring, and qualified teachers, and 2) the program faculty’s claims about the accomplishments of the graduates with regard to Quality Principle I.
The rationale also shows how the assessment procedures reflect the features of the program (e.g., graduation requirements, admission criteria and procedures, coursework, field assignments, and experiences).
The program should describe its assessments in such a way that a reasonable person would conclude, Yes, it makes sense that the measures selected are fitting, apt, and appropriate to test the claims. It makes sense, based on these measures, that the claims are (or could be expected to be) credible.
The rationale would show how subject matter knowledge is connected to, for example, the completion of the major in the subject matter field, the individual course requirements, the grades given in the courses, the scores on standardized tests of the major field, pupil learning from the student teacher, a senior thesis, and the ratings of clinical supervisors.
The faculty members explain why it is reasonable that they have chosen to support their claim that the teacher education candidates know their subject matter with such measures, for example, as grades in the major courses, scores on Praxis II, scores on the state curriculum tests, scores on the GRE subject matter test, grades on the senior thesis in the major, cogency of the candidates’ lesson plans in their subjects.
In sum, the rationale section explains why the faculty members think it is reasonable to use the particular measures of student learning they have selected. The rationale is implicitly revealed in the selection of the measures identified in Appendix E. The rationale section makes explicit the faculty’s reasons for the choices. (Example)
In writing the rationale, faculty members explain why they find it reasonable to believe that the results of the assessments they use support their claims and are credible and convincing. Building a case for credibility can be done step-by-step by considering each of the following three links:
1. Assessment procedures and the program goal. Is the link between the faculty’s assessments and the goal for the program credible and reasonable? The faculty’s assessments need to be linked conceptually, and empirically if possible, to the program goal that the graduates are competent, caring, and qualified. (Example)
2. Assessment procedures and claims. This link in the rationale demonstrates how the assessment procedures are sensitive to the narrower claims that faculty may make about their graduates. (Example)
3. Assessment procedures and program requirements. In the rationale, the program faculty also links the program requirements with the assessments that the faculty uses:
-Are the requirements and the assessments aligned well?
-Are teacher candidates also assessed in terms of what they were actually taught in the program?
-Did the faculty truly assess what was taught in the program quite apart from whether what was taught was connected to the larger claims and goals of the program? (Example)
After the program faculty members analyze and articulate the links, they develop the narrative of the rationale. The narrative might address such questions as these:
-Did the faculty measure what was covered in the program?
-Did the faculty assess what the overall program was designed to produce?
-Did the faculty’s assessment procedures assure them and others that their graduates are competent, caring, and qualified?
COMMENT
Why include a rationale? The field of education has legitimate concerns about the reliability and validity of the evidence available in the field of education. To satisfy TEAC’s Quality Principle II, the program faculty must have an ongoing investigation of the means by which it provides evidence for each component of Quality Principle I. Quality Principle III, in fact, is partly about the need for this investigation. The investigation must accomplish two goals related to the assessment of student learning:
1. Support the choice of the assessments, particularly their links with the program’s design, the program’s goal, and the faculty claims made in support of the program goal
2. Reduce the credibility of confounding factors associated with the evidence from which the faculty draws its inferences |
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