Candidates’ mastery of the content necessary for accomplished teaching in their field is assessed by means of a computer-based assessment consisting of six individual 30-minute exercises taken at a designated testing center. The board contracts with a vendor to establish centers throughout the country so that 90 percent of candidates do not need to travel more than 60 miles. Candidates can take the assessment center exercises between July 1 and June 15. The NBPTS posts scoring guides on its website to assist candidates in understanding what will be expected of them; these describe several sample exercises and provide discussion of how responses are scored. These assessment exercises focus primarily on the candidates’ knowledge of the content important for the area in which they seek certification, although some questions cover pedagogical strategies.
For the middle childhood generalist certificate, the six exercises measure the ability to support reading skills, analyze student work, and integrate the arts, as well as knowledge of science, social studies, and health. For the middle childhood and early adolescence mathematics certificate, the six exercises measure candidates’ understanding of six areas (algebra and functions, connections, data analysis, geometry, number and operation sense, and technology and manipulatives) with an emphasis on the capacity to draw inferences and apply knowledge to real-world circumstances. For example, in a sample exercise for the middle childhood generalist certificate, the candidate is asked to imagine that he or she is working with a group of third grade students of mixed ability and to read a passage and a transcription of a student’s oral reading of the passage. The candidate then responds to four prompts that explicitly ask him or her to identify errors, cite examples from the student’s text to support analysis of the student’s skills, describe strategies for addressing the errors, and provide a rationale for using these strategies.
An example from the early adolescence mathematics assessments shows a similar assessment approach in a different context. The scoring guide for this exercise, which covers data analysis, explains that candidates must present: a complete and accurate graphical representation of a given set of data; a meaningful interpretation of the data based on the graphical representation; an appropriate and accurate alternate graphical representation of the data; and a meaningful, accurate, and distinct interpretation of the data based on its alternate graphical representation. For the exercise, the candidate is provided with some data on high-grossing movies. The candidate is asked to create a box-and-whisker plot to display the data, to discuss the skewing of the data, and then to produce an alternate representation of the data and answer a question about it. Learning things is not limited to the scentific area. Instead it also has relations with some other things like speaking a language or using software, including Rosetta Stone English and Rosetta Stone French. If you have a creative mind, you will make all your own differences in the end!