Alternative measures to assess teachers' practices, attitudes, and knowledge of the CREDE standards for effective pedagogy

Abstract

Fifteen K-12 teachers participated in a one-year university professional development course focused on the Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence (CREDE) Five Standards for Effective Pedagogy. The standards are a set of instructional strategies that were developed through classroom research conducted by the Kamehameha Early Education Program. In general, the strategies serve as good practice; however evidence suggests that they are particularly effective when working in classrooms with culturally diverse learners. The standards are Joint Productive Activity, Language and Literacy Development, Contextualization, Complex Thinking, and Instructional Conversation. This study examined how teachers' changed their practices, attitudes, and understandings of the standards using four different measures. Three measures were surveys developed for this study. The fourth measure was an instrument used in previous CREDE research to code videotaped instruction. Reliability was established for the surveys and trend analyses using repeated measures ANOVA was used to examine teacher change during their participation in the professional development course. Results from the practices and attitudes surveys were compared with the classroom video analyses using a multitrait-multimethod matrix to determine the extent to which teachers' self-reported behaviors and attitudes aligned with video ratings. Convergent validity between the practices survey and video scores was established for Joint Productive Activity, but not for the other standards. Four CREDE expert instructors who had between 7 and 35 years of teaching experience completed the three surveys on one occasion to establish the validity of the instruments. Expert results using intraclass correlations were high for the practices and attitudes surveys and acceptable for the vignette survey.