Teacher Education at Grambling State University

In the decade since the mid-1970s, there has been a distinct trend toward increased use of competency tests in the certification of teachers. By 1982, fifteen states required new entrants into the profession to gain certification via the testing route. The test required by eight of the fifteen was the National Teacher Examinations Core Battery, developed and administered by Educational Testing Service. At this writing, twenty-eight states use the National Teacher Examinations (NTE), twenty-one of them requiring it for initial certification. In 1977 the Louisiana legislature passed a law that required all new applicants for teacher certification to take and pass a competency test. Decisions about which test and what cutoff score to use were the province of the state superintendent of public instruction. Thus, when the superintendent selected the NTE as its competency test, Louisiana became the ninth state to require that test for certification. To assist him in making the decision, the state superintendent convened panels of teacher educators from all of the state's public and private colleges and universities to participate in a study to determine the validity of the NTE's content for use in Louisiana. Panelists who were familiar with the knowledge and academic skills needed for competent performance as a beginning teacher were asked to perform the following tasks: (1) examine each test question and judge whether students in their college programs had an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and academic skills to answer it correctly; (2) examine the description of test content that guides the development of each edition of the test, and judge whether each

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• Recruitment of Minority Teachers

  Open Access•Susan O Spellman•Journal of Teacher Education•1988

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