Study of the Impact of the California Formative Assessment and Support System for Teachers. Report 2, Relationship of BTSA/CFASST Engagement and Teacher Practices

Author(s):

Thompson, Marnie
Paek, Pamela
Goe, Laura
Ponte, Eva

Publication Year:

2004

Report Number:

RR-04-31

Supplemental Report Number(s):

CFASST-2

Abstract:

The California Formative Assessment and Support System for Teachers (CFASST) is a structured, 2-year induction program for beginning teachers that is used as part of California's Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) program. This study employed a quasi-experimental design to assess the impact of BTSA/CFASST on teacher practices and student achievement, by comparing teachers who had a high level of exposure to BTSA/CFASST to teachers who had little or no exposure. This report, the second of four stemming from the study, focuses on BTSA/CFASST's impact on teacher practices. Data were collected from 34 elementary school teachers who had varying levels of engagement with the program, using a classroom observation methodology that yielded ratings on ten measures of teaching practice: instructional planning, reflection on practice, questioning (three measures), feedback (three measures), depth of student understanding, and overall teaching practice. We hypothesized that the higher a teacher's CFASST engagement level, the stronger their teaching practices would be. For 7 of the 10 measures of teaching practice, the high engagement group had a greater mean score than the low engagement group, though the difference was significant only for instructional planning. On the 3 measures for which the high engagement group did not outscore the low engagement group, the score differences were close to zero. If BTSA/CFASST had no effect, we would expect the low CFASST group means to be larger than the high CFASST group means on roughly half the measures, since the correlations among the measures was not high. The fact that this did not occur suggests that BTSA/CFASST may have a positive impact on teaching practices. These generally positive patterns were reflected in the effect sizes for the 10 measures of teaching practice. These range from near zero to 1.46 standard deviations (SDs), with most in the range of 0.23 to 0.54 SDs. The average effect size is 0.32 SDs.