Some Criterion Problems in Evaluation of Teacher Education
Psychologists are frequently called upon to evaluate the programs of psychiatrists, rehabilitation workers, educators and other groups where a large component of the program effort is addressed to effecting emotional and cognitive changes in human beings. In the field of teacher training, educators have long assessed the amount of subject matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge a student teacher has acquired. More recently, psychologists have helped to devise ways of assessing affective gains by the sntdent teacher. Nonetheless, the best criterion of effective teacher education is the gain pupils show when taught by graduates of the tested programs. In the beginning of any new educational programs, it is practically necessary to make some provisional assumptions about desirable student teacher behaviors, as intermediate criteria. I t is not enough to stop here, however. As proper measures are developed for necessary pupil gain, affective as well as cognitive, it is possible to work backward to revise the intermediate criteria (student teacher gains) so that they are better predictions of the ultimate criterion: pupil gain. Once revised intermediate criteria are developed, it is possible to revise the teacher education program more economically. It is not then necessary to measure pupil gain in order to validate every new modification in the program. Even accepting this intermediate state as the most sensible level at which to assess the training program, it is not sound to evaluate the entire, complex training program by a few vastly generalized criterion measures of teaching behavior. Instead, it is better to evaluate each important, individual component of the program by criterion measures tailored specifically to the specific skills or attitudes at which that training unit is aimed. To put it in terms of instructional design, the training is best done by means of a series of relatively small, discrete units, each of which has its carefully identified, measureable "behavioral objectives." The ultimate test of the viability of the training program then becomes the degree to which these "behavioral objectives," when attained by the student teachers, produce significant pupil gain in the classroom. The measurement of the behavioral objective as an intermediate criterion thus speaks both to the improvement of pupil gain and to the improvement of the instructional unit, or module, which produces the intermediate teaching behavior.