When teachers have a practical, easy to use tool to self-assess acts of teacher leadership, they are better equipped to develop as leaders by self-determining to whom or what they are committed (relatedness), what they know and can do (competence), and when and how to act (autonomy). The purpose of this mixed methods study was to assess the…

Background: The shortage of skilled workers choosing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers in the USA and worldwide has fueled a movement towards STEAM, in which the "A" addresses the arts and humanities. STEAM education has been proposed as a way to offer relevant problems to solve while drawing on creative and…

National policy and standards documents, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress frameworks, the "Common Core State Standards" and the "Next Generation Science Standards," assert the need to assess critical-analytic thinking (CAT) across subject areas. However, assessment of CAT poses several challenges for…

Background: Collecting data on instructional practices is an important step in planning and enacting meaningful initiatives to improve undergraduate science instruction. Self-report survey instruments are one of the most common tools used for collecting data on instructional practices. This paper is an instrument- and item-level analysis of…

The purpose of this research was to develop a new tool for assessing multicultural and international competency in faculty teaching through vignette scenarios of university classroom critical incidents--across disciplines of clinical and forensics psychology, business, and education. Construct and content validity of the initial draft vignettes…

This article presents information on the development and initial validation of the 16-item Response to Intervention (RTI) Beliefs Scale. The scale is designed to measure the extent to which educators working in schools hold beliefs consistent with the tenets of RTI. The authors administered the instrument to 2,430 educators in 62 elementary…

The quality of teaching in higher education is a topic which has generated heated debate in China, though there has been a remarkable paucity of empirical research into the characteristics of teaching and learning in Chinese universities. This study examined Chinese university students' course experience and its influence on their approaches to…

Teachers' professional knowledge is assumed to be a key variable for effective teaching. As teacher education has the goal to enhance professional knowledge of current and future teachers, this knowledge should be described and assessed. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies quantitatively measures physics teachers' professional…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' practices and beliefs related to the teaching of stringed instrument tuning in elementary and middle school group classes. The aspects examined included the following: (a) teachers' beliefs about teaching tuning in their string classes, (b) activities teachers used when teaching tuning in string…

The Learning Style Profile (LSP) is one of the first assessment instruments that measures cognitive skills as well as affective and environmental preferences. Developed for use with sixth-through twelfth-grade learners, the LSP consists of 126 questions representing 24 sub-scales These 24 subscales represent four higher-order constructs: (1)…

Structured questionnaires and semi-structured interviews are often used in mixed method studies to generate confirmatory results despite differences in methods of data collection, analysis, and interpretation. A review of 19 questionnaire-interview comparison studies found that consensus and consistency statistics were generally weak between…

This handbook is designed as a quick reference for first-year teachers who find themselves in an assessment driven environment with little experience to help make sense of the language, underlying philosophy, or organizational structure of the assessment system. The handbook begins with advice on developing and evaluating effective learning…

Schilling et al. (this issue) have done a commendable job in illustrating a comprehensive process of validating assessments of teacher knowledge (and, more broadly, other types of tests as well). On one hand, the concrete illustration of a process that often remains murky and incomplete is profoundly heartening, as it provides a rigorous model for…

The development and validation of the Teacher Beliefs Survey (TBS) is described. The TBS, an instrument for assessing the beliefs of teachers related to constructivist and traditional approaches to teaching and learning, contains 21 items in three hypothetical constructs. Elementary teachers, preservice (n = 61) and in-service (n = 137),…

This paper represents Part I of a two-part study examining preservice teachers' development of a personalized, research-based Science Teaching Rationale (STR). Researchers have historically documented the application of the "rationale paper" (Clough, 1992; Veronesi, 1998) using qualitative methodologies. Since the rationale paper continues to…