Assessing a School Staff as a Community of Professional Learners
A Note to the Readers
As noted earlier in this paper, the instrument was shared with staff at AEL. Study, conversation, and other interaction between the SEDL qualitative researcher and the AEL quantitative evaluator resulted in a working agreement: the SEDL instrument would be made available and used extensively in diverse school settings, and AEL would conduct the statistical processing to test the instrument and assess its psychometric properties.
At this point it is important to provide a note to our Issues readers. The purpose of this paper is awareness -- to let our colleagues know that the instrument exists. Because of the broad clientele of our audience, an effort has been made:
- to keep the language and terminology reasonably understandable to those who are not experts in instrument design and testing, but also
- to present information about the instrument in such a way that it is credible to those who are instrument aficionados and quantitatively oriented. The challenge has been to serve these two purposes.
Those readers who are not interested in the psychometric testing of the instrument, may skip to page 7 for Conclusions about the statistical tests. Those who are more keen about psychometrics, should read on, understanding that it is not the intention of this Issues paper to present the full range of procedures and results conducted in the field test on the instrument. Those interested in the full report may see Meehan, Orletsky, and Sattes (1997). Those concerned about the robustness of the field test, its procedures, and reporting, should review FY97 Report: External evaluation of the Appalachia Educational Laboratory (1998).
In this report, external evaluators scored the AEL field test study with two ratings of "outstanding" (on Utility and Accuracy) and two ratings of "satisfactory" (on Feasibility and Propriety), based on national evaluation standards.
Next Page: Pilot Test of the Instrument