A Study On American Teacher Competency Examination-Praxis Series

A Teachers which was published on 31^st Oct. 1993 prescribed that China began to use Teacher Competency Examination to choose qualified teachers. Teacher Competency Examination was carried into execution in 1995. At present, our Teacher Competency Examination system is divided into three steps, first Chinese Educational Department sets down the testing general outline; provincial educational departments are responsible to list the testing details and organize the examination by themselves; and city educational departments carry out the whole examination. Just because of the different testing standards and contents, disordered organization and management our teacher competency test which exits many problems and is difficult to be managed by our government can't make a correct and objective assessment of teacher qualification appliers. With the development of teacher professionalism and higher expectation of teacher quality, how to train and select qualified teachers becomes an emphasis of our teacher education research. It is urgent to build an objective standardized testing system to evaluate the subject knowledge and teaching skills of teacher qualification appliers effectively.On the view of educational system comparison research this paper analyzes the structure, characteristics, implementing method, managing system of the most popular teacher examination in America-Praxis Series and gets some inspirations on Chinese teacher qualification exam. It is divided into three parts, first is the description of Praxis Series which including its history, status quo,...