Overview of the Instructional Quality Assessment
Author(s): Brian Junker, Yanna Weisberg, Lindsay Clare Matsumura, Amy Crosson, Mikyung Kim Wolf, Allison Levison, and Lauren Resnick
Abstract:
Educators, policy-makers, and researchers need to be able to assess the efficacy of specific interventions in schools and school Districts. While student achievement is unquestionably the bottom line, it is essential to open up the educational process so that each major factor influencing student achievement can be examined; indeed as a proverb often quoted in industrial quality control goes, “That which cannot be measured, cannot be improved”. Instructional practice is certainly a central factor: if student achievement is not improving, is it because instructional practice is not changing, or because changes in instructional practice are not affecting achievement? A tool is needed to provide snapshots of instructional practice itself, before and after implementing new professional
development or other interventions, and at other regular intervals to help monitor and focus efforts to improve instructional practice. In this paper we review our research program building and piloting the Instructional Quality Assessment (IQA), a formal toolkit for rating instructional quality based primarily on classroom observation and student assignments. In the first part of the paper we review the need for, and some other efforts to provide, direct assessments of instructional practice. In the second part of this paper we briefly summarize the development of the IQA in reading comprehension and in mathematics at the elementary school level. In the third part of the paper we report on a large pilot study of the IQA, conducted in Spring 2003 in two moderately large urban school Districts. We conclude with some ideas about future work and future directions for the IQA.
APA Citation:
Junker, B., Weisberg, Y., Matsumura, L. C., Crosson, A., Wolf, M. K., Levison, A., et al. (2006). Overview of the instructional quality assessment (CSE Technical Report No. 671). Los Angeles: University of California, National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST).
Link: http://www.cse.ucla.edu/products/reports/r671.pdf
Items in XPress
- Research for High-Quality Urban Teaching: Defining It, Developing It, Assessing It
- Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers
- Using Classroom Artifacts to Measure Instructional Practice in Middle School Science: A Two-State Field Test
- Overview of the Instructional Quality Assessment
