Latest Evidence on the National Staff Development Council's Standards Assessment Inventory

In 2003, SEDL developed the Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI) for the National Staff Development Council (NSDC), based on the NSDC's standards which reflect the theoretical foundations and promising practices in school-based professional development literature. This research brief summarizes SEDL's research and development on the SAI to date, with specific emphasis on its psychometric properties, and presents the latest evidence on how teacher professional development contributes to student achievement. After providing background information on the development of the SAI, this brief presents the current findings on whether identifiable factors emerged from teachers' responses on the SAI and whether teacher assessment of professional development using these factors were related to student learning. The findings are promising and provide researchers and educators more confidence that the SAI measure, when aggregated as a school-level summary variable, is a reliable and valid measure that has demonstrated significant associations with student academic achievement. Taken together, these findings are promising and encourage additional analyses to explore the potential of the SAI measuring a set of educationally meaningful constructs and their relationship to academic achievement of students in predictive models.