The assessment of teacher learning needs to be tied to the initial learning goals for using video, thus different activities will need different types of assessments. Surveys of teachers’ experiences and satisfaction with video as a learning tool are quite revealing and may inform revision and improvement of teacher education experiences. Nonetheless, actual evidence of learning progress should be collected to assess whether the learning goals have been achieved.
Teacher educators and researchers who have collected such evidence, have used a variety of assessment tools, ranging from transcripts of teacher discussions of video clips analyzed for ways they change over time (Stockero, 2008; van Es & Sherin, 2008), to interviews structured around video clips of classroom teaching (Sherin & van Es, 2009), to written commentaries typed in online platforms (Santagata et al., 2007; Santagata & Angelici, 2010; Santagata & Guarino, 2011).
Qualitative analyses of teachers’ discussions, reflections, or written comments are very effective at highlighting teachers’ viewing processes and reasoning and how these change over time as a result of video-supported learning activities.
Frameworks we have used in our research and teaching include:
- A Framework for Learning to Notice Student Thinking
This framework draws from prior research on teacher noticing and analysis abilities to capture different levels of sophistication in what teachers notice about student mathematical thinking in video clips and how they notice. The framework identifies five levels of noticing, ranging from a baseline to an extended level, that increase in the specificity of what teacher notice about student thinking, and in their ability to elaborate, interpret, and make connections between different elements in the video.
van Es, E. A. (2011). A framework for learning to notice student thinking. In Mathematics teacher noticing (pp. 164-181). Routledge. Click here to access.
- Assessing Pre-service Teachers’ Ability to Analyze Lessons. In a series of teacher education courses centered on learning from teaching, we engaged teachers in video-based activities. Pre-service teachers learned to analyze teaching and learning interactions in systematic ways and we assessed their learning through video-based tasks. You can find examples of these tasks and ways we scored pre-service teachers commentaries in the following publications:
Santagata, R., & Angelici, G. (2010). Studying the impact of the lesson analysis framework on preservice teachers’ abilities to reflect on videos of classroom teaching. Journal of teacher education, 61(4), 339-349.
Santagata, R., & Guarino, J. (2011). Using video to teach future teachers to learn from teaching. ZDM, The International Journal of Mathematics Education, 43(1), 133-145. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11858-010-0292-3
Santagata, R., Zannoni, C., & Stigler, J. W. (2007). The role of lesson analysis in pre-service teacher education: An empirical investigation of teacher learning from a virtual video-based field experience. Journal of mathematics teacher education, 10(2), 123-140. https://tinyurl.com/ssqso2m
In addition, check out our resource pages for more ideas about video-supported activities and assessment tools: https://tinyurl.com/OptimizingOnlineVideo