Simulating teaching: New possibilities for assessing teaching practice

This paper argues that successful practice-based teacher education requires innovations in assessment that can better inform preservice teachers and those who prepare them. Such assessments must focus directly on specific teaching practices of novice teachers, as well as offer opportunities to assess the use of content knowledge for teaching. Simulations, an assessment type used in other professional fields, hold promise as one means for gathering data about and providing feedback on teaching. To explain how this could work, we describe an assessment that focuses on preservice teachers’ ability to elicit and interpret a student’s mathematical thinking, and we appraise what it makes possible.

Shaughnessy, M., Boerst, T., & Ball, D. L. (2015). Simulating teaching: New possibilities for assessing teaching practice. In T. Bartell & K. Bieda (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.