Whatever the format, the authors of the Inquiry Brief Proposal, and their roles in the institution, should be identified as they are taking responsibility for the proposal and the commitments made within it for the eventual Inquiry Brief. There should also be an endorsement of the Inquiry Brief Proposal by the program faculty that documents that the Inquiry Brief Proposal was presented, discussed, and approved by the faculty and that they intend to implement the proposal.

1. INTRODUCTION. This brief section is identical to the Introduction of the Inquiry Brief.

2. CLAIMS & RATIONALE. This section, as in the Inquiry Brief, contains two parts. In the first, 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 to describe its graduates’ expected professional characteristics as long as each component of Quality Principle I is addressed. Like 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. There cannot be one set of claims for TEAC and a different set for other audiences.

Claims. The term, claim, in the Inquiry Brief Proposal is used to indicate the proposed claim, the prediction, the hoped-for-outcome, or the hypothesis. The general guidelines for writing claims about the projected outcomes of the program are the same as they are for writing claims for the Inquiry Brief.

The whole point of the TEAC accreditation process is to test the claims that are being proposed in the Inquiry Brief Proposal. 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 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 Inquiry Brief Proposal are the same as the guidelines for the Inquiry Brief.

3. METHODS. In this section, the program faculty describes in detail 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 evidence of student learning by some combination of the categories of evidence (1-20) that are available to it. All the evidence available with regard to 1-20 must be reported in the final Inquiry Brief. The faculty will also need to consider validity issues.

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, that 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 they faculty has had the opportunity to investigate the properties of measures they may 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.

5. DISCUSSION AND PLAN. This section also speaks to two elements of Quality Principle III, namely, how the program and the plan for continuous improvement of the program will be affected by the expected results, and how past decisions about the program have been influenced by the results from the operation of the quality control system.

6. REFERENCES. This section is merely the traditional citation listing of all works and sources mentioned in the Inquiry Brief Proposal.

7. APPENDICES. The Inquiry Brief Proposal should have five appendices:

Appendix A: Quality Control System. Appendix A in the Inquiry Brief Proposal is the same as it is in the Inquiry Brief. Quality Principle III is primarily about the system that the faculty has developed to investigate, ensure, and monitor the quality of the program. It is of paramount importance in the TEAC preaccreditation or new program accreditation decision.

Appendix B: Components of Capacity for Program Quality Appendix B is also the same in the Inquiry Brief Proposal as it is in the Inquiry Brief with the exception that some evidence for capacity that depends upon evidence of student learning will not be available.

Appendix C: Faculty. Appendix C is the same in the Inquiry Brief Proposal as in the Inquiry Brief.

Appendix D: The Program Requirements. Appendix D is the same in the Inquiry Brief Proposal as it is the Inquiry Brief.

Appendix E: Inventory of Evidence. Appendix E is the same in the Inquiry Brief Proposal as it is in the Inquiry Brief.

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