Charles S. Thompson

Research-Based Teacher Candidate Dispositions Assessment System: Moving Forward.

To achieve educational success and advance high-quality teacher preparation programmes, teacher educators, administrators, policy-makers, and novice and advanced teacher candidates must identify and cultivate positive dispositions for professional competence, commitment, and success in teaching children and adolescents. Therefore, a reliable and refined teacher candidate disposition assessment system should be created with a clear sense of critical underlying issues, including an acknowledgement that these issues related to candidate dispositions are not singularly about empirical data (Wilson and Young 2005). The present research project (Jung and Rhodes in press; Jung, Rhodes, and Vogt 2006) at an urban American university focuses on extending earlier researchers’ work in establishing a research-based disposition assessment system for teacher education programmes. The project is currently in progress, with quantitative and qualitative analyses of existing measures and disposition constructs, reviews of research on dispositions, and the modification, development, and validation of disposition measures across teacher education programmes being conducted. The research project consists of: