Section 1. Program overview. This opening section is identical to that described for the Inquiry Brief.

Section 2. Claims and rationale. This section, as in the Inquiry Brief, contains two parts. In the first, claims, the program faculty hypothesizes that the program’s graduates will be competent, caring, and qualified professional educators. The program faculty is free to use comparable terms or the language of state and national standards to describe its graduates’ expected professional characteristics but must address each component of TEAC‘s Quality Principle I. As with the Inquiry Brief, the particular claims proposed in the Inquiry Brief Proposal must be consistent with, and inclusive of, the claims made about the program that appear in the institution’s catalog, mission statements, state program approval/registration reports, and other promotional literature. The faculty cannot make one set of claims for TEAC and a different set for other audiences.

In the Inquiry Brief Proposal, claims are more appropriately advanced as questions in the same way that researchers advance their expectations and hunches as hypotheses and research questions. A claim in the program’s proposal could read: Is it the case that our graduates succeed on the state’s curriculum standards tests? The Inquiry Brief Proposal sets out the plan to answer this and other related questions in the affirmative.

Rationale. The second part of this section of the Inquiry Brief Proposal provides a rationale for the assessments as credible measures of each proposed claim associated with Quality Principle I. The guidelines for the rationale of the Inquiry Brief Proposal are the same as those for the Inquiry Brief. In the Inquiry Brief the credibility of the measures is eventually and ultimately addressed by the evidence that is procured and displayed in the Results Section of the Inquiry Brief. While the authors of the Inquiry Brief Proposal do not have results on the scale required for the Inquiry Brief, they can and should provide some evidence of student learning that stems from pilot investigations of the proposed measures or from their recent experience using the measures they have readily available (e.g., grades, license test scores) for a small sample of their students.

In other words, the faculty’s confidence in their proposed measures and the credibility of their rationale for the proposed measures requires that they examine and present the evidence they already possess for some of the measures of student achievement in their proposal.*

Section 3. Methods of assessment. In this section, the program faculty describes in detail the research design and the proposed methods of assessment that it proposed in the rationale. It also describes, in detail, the methods by which it proposes to find the evidence it will use to support the claim that its assessments of student learning are reliable and valid. Here the program faculty proposes the methods by which it will assure itself and others that the claims it will make about its students are credible and that the proposed methods can be trusted and relied upon.

A program faculty will typically provide its evidence of student learning through some combination of the available evidence (see the inventory for Appendix E). Only in the Inquiry Brief must the program faculty report all the evidence available. However, in writing the Inquiry Brief Proposal, the faculty will also need to consider research design issues discussed in the section on methods.

Section 4. Results. The results section of the Inquiry Brief Proposal briefly describes the kinds of data and evidence that can be expected in the Inquiry Brief. The proposal may contain results from previous analyses, or pilot studies, which would be predictive of results that will be expected and used to support the claims that will be made in the subsequent Inquiry Brief itself. The section may also contain evidence that speaks to the reliability and validity of the measures the faculty is proposing to use. If the faculty members have had the opportunity to investigate the properties of measures they have used for some time, they may already have evidence about the reliability and validity of the measures they are proposing. It is appropriate to present this evidence in the results section of the Inquiry Brief Proposal.

The proposed evidence, whether quantitative or qualitative, should be representative of the program under review and not idiosyncratic to a particular time period or circumstance. In cases where a program is undergoing revisions and renewal, the results should be of a character that will support a sound prediction of what future results will be.

Section 5. Discussion and plan. This section also speaks to two elements of Quality Principle III: (1) how the program and the plan for continuous improvement of the program will be affected by the expected results, and (2) how past decisions about the program have been influenced by the results from the operation of the quality control system.

Section 6. References. In this section, the faculty lists all works and sources mentioned in the Inquiry Brief Proposal.

Section 7. Appendices. The Inquiry Brief Proposal should have the same five appendices as does the Inquiry Brief:

· In Appendix A, the program faculty documents that its quality control system func-tions as claimed and enhances the program. The program’s quality control system is evidence that the program has met TEAC’s Quality Principle III. It is of paramount importance in the TEAC preaccreditation or new program accreditation decision. TEAC expects that the faculty has developed a system to investigate, ensure, and monitor the quality of the program.

· In Appendix B, the program faculty addresses the components of capacity (4.1–4.7) and documents that the institution committed to program quality

· In Appendix C, the program faculty describes its qualifications

· In Appendix D, the program faculty describes the program requirements

· In Appendix E, the program faculty describes the available evidence and identifies the evidence that it will include or reject in the subsequent Inquiry Brief. Appendix E, the inventory of evidence, is the same as it is in the Inquiry Brief except that through it the faculty proposes the evidence that will be used in the Inquiry Brief.

* All accreditors recognized by the US Secretary of Education are required to provide feedback on student learning to the programs they accredit. The evidence behind the credibility of the proposed assessments cited in the Rationale and presented in the Results also enables TEAC to fulfill its federal obligations under §602, which requires TEAC to “provide the institution or program with a detailed report that assesses the institution’s or program’s performance with respect to student achievement."



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