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Development and Field Test of an Employment Selection Instrument for Teachers in Urban School Districts

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Abstract

Employment interviews are widely used in the selection of quality teachers, and indeed research confirms administrators’ belief in the validity of the procedure. However, many key recommendations for improving the general reliability of interviews including selecting questions that are job-related and research grounded, including well designed scoring rubrics, and incorporating adaptive variable-length interview designs are generally not well implemented in currently available instruments. Furthermore, emerging research suggests the need for specially tailored interviews that assess attitudes and pre-dispositions deemed essential to teachers’ effectiveness in certain high attrition environments like urban schools. This study describes the development and initial field-test results of a computer based, adaptive interview with an additional domain included for teachers in urban areas. The instrument is based on careful analysis of the suggestions from the extant literature base about effective employment interview techniques, effective general teaching practices, and sound teaching strategies in urban schools. By comparing the interview scores of 30 teachers with varying effectiveness ratings provided by administrators in one urban district, significant correlations were found. Regression analysis indicated a significant amount of variance in teachers’ effectiveness ratings could be predicted from their scores on the interview instrument.

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Notes

  1. To compound matters, publishers of most commercial employment interviews in education are reluctant to publicly release studies and internal data that would allow school districts to make rational selection decisions based on known measurement statistics. When these statistics are publicly reported (primarily in dissertations), about 80% of the studies indicate that such commercial instruments have little or no predictive validity.

  2. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education, National Commission of Teaching and America’s Future, Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Systems Consortium, Association of Teacher Educators, National Association of State Boards of Education, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, Homes Group, American Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, Florida State Department of Education, Educational Testing Service, and the American Association of School Personnel Administrators.

  3. The cluster representing Knowledge of Teaching was composed of questions from five domains: planning, delivering instruction, assessment, student interactions, and climate development.

  4. After each response the computer calculates the standard deviation for the series of questions on a particular scale. After a fixed number of responses, depending of the version selected, and the standard deviation is less than 0.575, the program branches to the next theme area.

  5. However, the addition of the Urban scale to the basic ICIS instrument increases the R square value only 0.01. Obviously, the Urban scale captures little variation not represented by the basic ICIS instrument.

  6. For suggestion about additional research or documentation of prior research using the ICIS interview system, please e-mail (howard@ku.edu).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kansas, 439 Pearson Hall, 1122 West Campus Road, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Howard Ebmeier & Jennifer Ng

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  1. Howard Ebmeier
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  2. Jennifer Ng
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Correspondence to Howard Ebmeier.

Additional information

Versions of the ICIS and ICIS-Urban instruments appropriate for use in school districts may be obtained from AASPA, 533-B Mur-len Road, Olathe, KS 66062 (http://www.aaspa.org). Versions useful for university-based research can be obtained at no cost from the Howard Ebmeier.

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Ebmeier, H., Ng, J. Development and Field Test of an Employment Selection Instrument for Teachers in Urban School Districts. J Pers Eval Educ 18, 201–218 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-006-9021-4

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