Abstract
U.S. teacher educators are faced with serious challenges to demonstrate the quality of the graduates they prepare. These challenges are expressed in the country's fixation on accountability and testing. We are witnessing the growth of standardized tests and alternative routes to certification as panaceas intended to solve the teacher shortage crisis in most states. National accreditation and state program approval agencies are attempting to stem the tide through the ever-increasing demand for standards-based assessment data documenting teacher quality. The common set of standards used nationally for accreditation was developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and promulgated by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) in the form of ten principles. Each of the principles includes indicators written at the knowledge, skill, and dispositional levels, forming constructs that colleges are required to measure. Sadly, neither the profession nor the accreditors have realized the need for objective measurement. This is largely a function of what Stiggins bemoans as assessment illiteracy (2000). They are satisfied, at best, with ordinal scales for poorly constructed criteria on ill-defined tasks, or, at worst, with counting papers in portfolios constructed without regard to any form of psychometric consideration (Wilkerson and Lang, 2003). In this paper, however, the focus was on assessment of dispositions. (Contains 5 tables and 6 figures.)