This position paper introduces the idea of cognicy, the foundational ability to think and understand in a process that decouples cognitive processes from their tangible outcomes. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can produce output often nearly indistinguishable from a human product, which presents a problem for educational assessment.…

Within this issue of "Teacher Education Quarterly," the authors examine the social justice knowledge of teachers, reflective practices, and predictors of performance on the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). This article is a response to those articles and offers continued probes into who should be allowed to teach our…

The purpose of this commentary is to describe recent efforts in Virginia to develop and use performance assessments, including the challenges that emerged during this process and key considerations for states that integrate performance assessment into their systems. Performance assessments can play an important role in preparing students for…

A response to Stosich et al.'s (2018) article reviewing ways in which states have taken up performance assessments, this commentary seeks to extend the focus and use of performance assessments to preservice teacher education. As such, the authors describe statewide initiatives in New Hampshire that are working to integrate performance assessments…

This article presents the author's response to the article "Taking Stock: Existing Resources for Assessing a New Vision of Science Learning" by Alonzo and Ke (this issue), which identifies numerous challenges that the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) pose for large-scale assessment. Jill Werthem comments that among those…

Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) provided a commentary on the manuscripts in the first part of this special issue, which highlighted the benefits of edTPA and the necessity for such assessment programs to improve teacher education and strengthen teaching practices. In turn, the authors responded to the SCALE commentary.…

Recent changes in art teacher certification requirements in New York, the state in which I teach, have prompted me to reconsider relationships between language, contemporary art, and art education. New York is participating in the educational Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), a national version of the Performance Assessment for California…

It is one thing to produce an innovative, construct-based assessment task; it's another to produce 10 a year that are comparable in difficulty, measure the same competencies, are free of differential item functioning, and can be scaled and equated. These challenges contributed to the failure of the performance (or authentic) assessment movement of…

This commentary argues that the OET research raises inescapable contradictions in trying to separate "language" from "communication" within a weak performance test and advocates for reconceptualizing the legitimate domain of "language" more widely, reclaiming the full potential of the communicative competence…