Research On The Performance Evaluation Of American Teacher Candidates

The quality of teachers,as an important factor affecting the quality of education,has become the focus of attention of various countries in the 21 st century.And the quality of teacher candidates is an important premise for enhancing the overall quality of teachers.For the purpose of increasing the quality of teacher candidates and enabling teacher candidates to acquire satisfactory teacher characteristics as well as behaving properly and being well prepared for teaching.It is necessary to carry out performance assessment of teacher candidates which is professional and normative.It is a great challenge for our country to predict the teacher candidates’ ability which is essential to teaching.Currently,problems in performance assessment of teacher candidates in China are as follows: lacking of assessment in authentic teaching situation of teacher candidates,professional training to teacher qualification personnel and embedding performance assessment to curriculum of teacher education and teaching practice.It is an urgent and realistic demands to promote and perfect the of performance assessment of teacher candidates in our country.Through 20 years’ study of performance assessment,United States teacher candidates’ performance assessment has accumulated abundant theoretical and practical experience.Recent years,an standard system of teacher candidates performance assessment called edTPA program which could be used in the whole nation has been exploited by Stanford University.Confirmed by considerable professional experiments,it turns out to predict teacher candidates’ ability of education and teaching practice effectively and help teacher candidates make progress in performance,which make the assessment more sophisticated,it is also a valuable reference for the development of teacher candidates’ performance assessment in China.Taking teacher candidates’ need,teacher education professional development and researcher’s interest into consideration,this study mainly focuses on performance assessment of American teacher candidates.Analysis of American teacher candidates’ performance assessment is about three aspects,including background,objective and function.Typical American performance assessment edTPA program is selected as an example.The analysis is conducted from four aspects,overview of the project,implementation of the project,outcomes of the project and external evaluation of the project.Summary includes characteristics of American teacher candidates’ performance assessment and its implication to our country.With a view to make a contribution to the improvement of teacher quality and development of education by drawing lessons from effective experience of performance assessment of American teacher candidates with reasonable suggestions to optimize the performance assessment of teacher candidates in China.