Score Report Overview
The purpose of the score report is to provide meaningful and actionable information to teacher educators about their elementary pre-service teachers’ performance on the CKT assessment about matter and its interactions. To create the teacher educator score report, our team drew upon design principles outlined by Zapata-Rivera et al. (2012), Zenisky and Hambleton (2012), and Zwick et al. (2014), such as providing multiple representations of both individual and class performance and making connections to instructional materials to support pre-service teacher CKT development. We also refined the initial teacher educator score report based on feedback from our project’s advisory board and a convenience sample of seven elementary teacher educators who had extensive experience in science teacher education.
Score Report Components
The teacher educator score report includes five main sections, each on its own separate tab in an Excel spreadsheet:
- Section 1 (score report overview) describes the purpose of the score report and presents information about the score report content and how to navigate across the different sections of the report.
- Section 2 (scale scores) describes individual pre-service teachers’ scores and aggregated class scores on the CKT assessment about matter and its interactions at the pretest and posttest time points, using various tables and graphs. This section also includes information about measurement error, comparison of the class scores to a reference population, and levels of performance.
- Section 3 (class summary) provides class summaries of the pre-service teachers’ performance by content areas and Work of Teaching Science (WOTS) categories for the pretest and posttest.
- Section 4 (item map) is a tool to help interpret the pre-service teachers’ CKT test scores. The item map ranks a subset of the CKT assessment items by difficulty, provides a summary of the skills assessed by the item, and maps the difficulty level to a scale score.
- Section 5 (acting on your results) provides information about example CKT matter items and instructional packets for use by elementary science teacher educators. This section describes the content areas and WOTS categories included in the CKT assessment and provides links to CKT item examples and CKT packets that can be used to guide instruction based on assessment results.
This video provides a short overview of the teacher educator score report and illustrates a few of the report’s interactive feature.
References
Zapata-Rivera, D., VanWinkle, W., & Zwick, R. (2012). Applying score design principles in the design of score reports for CBAL teachers. ETS Research Memorandum, 12-20.
Zenisky, A. L., & Hambleton, R. K. (2012). Developing test score reports that work: The process and best practices for effective communication. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 31(2), 21-26.
Zwick, R., Zapata-Rivera, D., & Hegarty, M. (2014). Comparing graphical and verbal representations of measurement error in test score reports. Educational Assessment, 19(2), 116-138.