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Assessing Rigor in Teacher Education: Do NCTQ’s Guidelines Measure Up?

Abstract The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has stated that many teacher education programs demonstrate a lack of rigor because a large percentage of their course grades come from assignments that are criterion-deficient, lacking specific criteria through which instructors can determine students' mastery of the material. This article applied NCTQ's criterion-referenced assignment guidelines to the courses in one university's integrated elementary teaching program. Ninety-four assignment descriptions from 16 course syllabi were analyzed to determine the type and function of assignment, the level of criterion-reference in the grading scheme, the level on Bloom's Taxonomy, and the weighting of the assignment in the overall course grade. This study found that NCTQ’s use of criterion-referenced assignments is by itself an insufficient measure of program rigor; instead, assessments should also include other metrics such as Bloom's Taxonomy and those that account for real-world applications of learning and differences in disciplinary concepts, pedagogies, and expectations.