Performance Tests of Teaching Proficiency: Rationale, Development, and Validation

In the last few years, however, evolving conceptions of the nature of instruction seem to offer promise to teacher effectiveness researchers. In most of the early investigations in which measures of teacher competence were sought, there was an almost exclusive focus on the instructional means employed by teachers. Researcher after researcher attempted to identify good teaching for, should such procedures be discovered, they would obviously have implications for teacher education as well as for the evaluation of teachers on the job. Only recently have many educators come to accept the proposition that there are diverse instructional means which can be used to bring about a single instructional end. Teacher effectiveness research based on this assumption will tend to focus on the results achieved by instructors, not merely the means they employ.