Chapter 12 A validity study of the certification system of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards

This article describes a construct validation study of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards’ system of advanced certification. The evidence analyzed in the study included teachers’ instructional objectives and lesson plans for a given instructional unit, data collected during visits to all 65 teachers’ classrooms, and transcripts of scripted interviews of the teachers and their students. Two validity questions were examined in this comparative study: (a) To what extent is the National Board's vision of accomplished practice, as laid down in its Standards documents and as instantiated in its assessments, consonant with the characteristics of teaching expertise that have emerged from the research and scholarly literature?, and (b) Can National Board Certified teachers (NBCTs) and their noncertified counterparts (non-NBCTs) be distinguished on the basis of the quality of work produced by their students? In every comparison between NBCTs and non-NBCTs on the dimensions of teaching excellence, NBCTs obtained higher mean scores. In 11 of the 13 comparisons, the differences were highly statistically significant.