Laura Schulte

Teacher Education

American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE)

Together with my colleagues from the College of Education, I made a presentation at the conference that addressed the UCAT theme of Assessment and e-Portfolios. The presentation was entitled “The Development and Validation of the Diversity Dispositions Index.” In this presentation we discussed the development and validation of a perceptual instrument that measures the dispositions needed to work with students from diverse backgrounds. The development and validation of the Diversity Dispositions Index (DDI) was the course project for instrument development in my applied advanced statistics course for our educational administration doctoral students. The students in the course served as members of the item development panel, reviewed the input from the content validity panel, and analyzed the pilot data as part of their final examination in the course. This project served as a way for us to model best practices in the development of assessment instruments for our doctoral students who are practicing administrators in P-12 schools. We plan to use the DDI as a self-assessment instrument in our graduate teacher education and educational administration programs and to collect data through our e-portfolios.

The conference information has impacted both my instruction and the teaching-learning process at UNO. I teach research and statistics courses, and I serve as the assessment coordinator in the College of Education. Information I gained from the conference has enhanced my instruction so that graduates of our programs can use data and research to ensure success for every child. As assessment coordinator, I have used information from the conference to enhance our assessment system to improve our programs so that our graduates teach every child effectively. I have shared information about assessment systems that I learned at the conference with colleagues from all departments/school in the College of Education.

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