It’s All About Student Learning: Assessing Teacher Candidates’ Ability to Impact P-12 Students, is a compilation of assessments of teacher candidate performance that demonstrate how candidates impact P-12 student learning. The new report contains 13 examples of assessments from individual institutions and 3 institutional consortia (CA, OH, and Renaissance Partner institutions) and was edited by Arthur E. Wise, NCATE President, and associates. The report offers an inside look at how schools of education today are able to provide evidence that their candidates positively affect P-12 student learning.

Wise, NCATE president and editor of the new report, says, "The report helps dispel lingering myths and old notions about teacher education and communicates what rigorous teacher preparation at accredited institutions is like today."

Hilda Rosselli, dean of the college of education at Western Oregon University, and a national leader in performance assessment, contributes an opening essay that sets the context for the assessments in the report. Rosselli says "NCATE's influence is a major impetus for the improved connections between teaching and student learning in teacher preparation. NCATE developed performance-based standards in 2000 and moved to a performance-based accreditation system in 2001. A centerpiece of the performance-based system is collecting and aggregating data to show that candidates have the knowledge and skills to teach effectively so that students learn."

Rosselli continues, "candidates must also have the ability to use assessment data they collect rather than just report it. They must be able to adjust instructional pace, change the sequence of skill development, select alternative modes of presentation, revisit a previously taught concept, or reconsider a means of motivating certain students. Candidates are now asked to explain why they selected a particular pre- and post-assessment, how they determined criteria and scoring for each part of an assessment, what adjustments were made to a post-assessment based on analysis of pre-assessment results, and what flaws they discovered in the assessment isntrument, with ways to improve its usefulness in the future. NCATE's standards require evidence that candidates at accredited institutions can use assessment data to make these types of adjustments."

NCATE's system of performance-based accreditation has helped drive the inclusion and analysis of P-12 student work as a key element in evaluating candidate performance. NCATE's pioneering role in outcomes-based accreditation has become a model for accrediting agencies that cover other academic units within the university.

NCATE is a specialized professional accrediting body for the preparation P-12 teachers and other professional school personnel. NCATE is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. Seven hundred eighteen institutions are in the NCATE system as accredited institutions or candidates and precandidates. NCATE institutions produce over two-thirds of the nation's new teacher graduates annually.

For more information on NCATE, visit www.ncate.org ; to order the book, click here.