Designing Rubrics to Assess Pedagogical Knowledge of Prospectives Teachers

Abstract

This study is encompassed within a two-year project that was commissioned by the Chilean Ministry of Education and executed by the University of Concepción. This initiative concerned the elaboration of open questions stemming from cases studies and the rubrics for them to be corrected, amongst other products. The case was conceived as an assessment resource with the purpose of linking the theoretical insights acquired by students-teachers, throughout their undergraduate training process, with their future professional development and professional learning. The open questions triggered the analysis of the outlined case and demanded from respondents the association between theory and practice through a reflective process of interpretation and re-interpretation, accessing the possible points of view that guide decisions of those who are represented. Thereby, the rubrics should provide quality assessment information on the students 'capacity to demonstrate their abilities to pose hypotheses and questions, to infer meanings and implicit information, to establish generalizations, to criticize models and strategies, to generate alternative didactics solutions. This paper reports on this stage of the project, namely, the devising of rubrics aimed at the assessment of the general pedagogical knowledge for prospective teachers. Two main methods were applied, i) Documental analysis, which had at its core the review of national standards that guide teacher training programmes. In this process, specific indicators were examined. This procedure came up with a categorization that comprised the content, the ability examined, and the theoretical difficulty level. ii) Expert panels, which congregated together higher education teachers and schoolteachers. These professionals were subdivided into three different groups for: writing, reviewing and external academics judges within an evolving process of reflection and improvement of the elaborated rubrics. The study's results state that, once determining content validity and construct validity, four interrelated notions emerged that should be the constituent elements within each rubric description level. This means, a descriptor should make reference to: the highest ability demonstrated within the answer, what actions might serve as evidence of those ability has been achieved, the core content which reflects the student's perspective or stance from which they elaborate their answer, what information from the case analysed was used to articulate their responses. This, in turn, allowed researchers to develop a writing scheme by integrating these four defined parameters. This approach was used as a theoretical frame in training assessors and in the design of all set of rubrics involved within the project.