خلاصة:
Accountability concerns in language education call for the development of more valid and authentic measures of assessment. In light of these concerns, performance assessment has received increasing interest in the context of teacher education programs and teacher licensing over the last decade. In Iran, a recent policy adopted by Farhangian University aims at assessing the professional competencies of its ELT graduates by requiring them to go through a performance assessment as part of the licensing requirements. Mounting concerns regarding the validity of traditional tests used for teacher certification (Mitchell, Robinson, Plake, & Knowles, 2001) have motivated Farhangian University to develop its own performance assessment. Therefore, the present study explored the components of the performance assessment through detailed analysis of the Curriculum Document of the English Major, review of literature, and investigation of the stakeholders' perspectives. To this end, in this exploratory study, convenience, purposive, and cluster sampling procedures were used for the selection of the teacher educators, student-teachers, and mentor teachers. Then, in-depth interviews were conducted with the stakeholders. Finally, based on the content analysis of the above-mentioned sources which resulted in a strong agreement, a performance assessment scheme with seventeen items was developed. However, results of the factor analysis yielded a thirteen-factor performance assessment scheme to be used as the criterion for assessing the professional competencies of student- teachers.
ملخص الجهاز:
Mounting concerns regarding the validity of traditional tests used for teacher certification (Mitchell, Robinson, Plake, & Knowles, 2001) have motivated Farhangian University to develop its own performance assessment.
The need for teacher evaluation as a tool contributing to professional development, learners' academic achievement, and quality assurance has revealed the potential benefits of high-stakes assessments, and in particular, performance-based assessments, for teacher learning, teaching quality, and student achievement (Danielson & Marquez, 1998; Delandshere & Arens, 2003; Haertel, 1991).
Therefore, the body of research on performance assessment, referring to "a measure of the complex pedagogical skills required for candidates to successfully teach and cause their students to learn" (Torgerson, Macy, Beare, & Tanner, 2009, p.
Motivated by the same concerns, Farhangian University has adopted a new policy, ASLAH (Evaluation of Professional Competencies), which requires student-teachers to go through a performance assessment prior to certification.
Specifically, the study aims to address the following research question: What are the major factors of a teacher performance scheme to be used as a benchmark for assessing Farhangian University's ELT student-teachers' competencies upon graduation?
The results indicated that items 11, 14, 12, 17, and 16, which are Engaging Students in Learning, Reflecting on Teaching, Using Assessment in Instruction, Reflective Observation, and Growing and Developing Professionally respectively, were considered the most focused items by the participants of this study.
It is widely accepted that the ability to manage student behavior must be taken into account when evaluating teacher performance (McKenzie, Rowley, Weldon & Murphy, 2011).