Preservice Performance Assessment and Teacher Early Career Effectiveness: Preliminary Findings on the Performance Assessment for California Teachers

This study presents preliminary findings on the relationship between beginning teacher’s scores on the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), a preservice performance assessment of a wide range of teaching skills, and their subsequent teaching effectiveness measured by students’ value-added achievement gains in English Language Arts (ELA). Linking PACT scores and four separate value-added estimates for 14 firstand second-year teachers with 259 students in third through sixth grade in an urban school district, total PACT score correlated approximately .50 with teacher value-added (ranging from .46 to .53, depending on the model), and subscores for the assessment dimension of the portfolio (evaluating candidates’ ability to use assessment data to support student learning) correlated .58 to .66 with value-added. PACT scores predicted very substantial differences in teacher value-added. For each additional point a teacher scored on PACT (evaluated on a 44-point scale), her students averaged a gain of one percentile point per year on the California Standards Tests as compared with similar students. Thus, students taught by a teacher at the top of the scale (44) scored, on average, 20 percentile points higher than those taught by a teacher receiving the lowest passing score (24). In this limited sample, PACT was a strong predictor of teacher effectiveness measured by students’ value-added achievement gains. Future studies will seek to increase the sample sizes with more complete data.