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A Science Lesson Plan Analysis Instrument for Formative and Summative Program Evaluation of a Teacher Education Program

"In evaluating the success of teacher development programs, measures of teaching practice that are valid, reliable, and scalable are needed. We have developed, validated, and piloted the Science Lesson Plan Analysis Instrument (SLPAI) for quantitative evaluation of teacher-generated multi-day lesson plans. The SLPAI was developed to complement traditional evaluation tools, such as teacher surveys and direct observational protocols, to enable us to capture the extent to which a teacher development program successfully addressed its goals of increasing teacher content and pedagogical knowledge and impacting teaching practice. This paper presents the development and validation of the SLPAI, and demonstrates its use in a pilot study examining teacher change as a result of program instruction. The SLPAI was utilized as a formative assessment, providing baseline information about the teaching practices of incoming program cohorts in order to tailor both pedagogical and content instruction appropriately. The SLPAI was also used to track and describe changes in teaching practice and pedagogical knowledge of teacher participants over time, and thereby provide summative evidence of program effectiveness. We report on the responses of several program instructors to these results, including revisions made to instructional design of their courses."

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