MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING
ABOUT IMPLEMENTING PACT
The PACT (Performance Assessment Collaborative) accepts the [new partner]’s request to join the PACT consortium. This MOU outlines the roles and responsibilities of our partner universities. [The new partner] agrees to fully participate in all activities that support full scale implementation of PACT across all certification areas offered at the institution. PACT has Teaching Events in the following content areas: multiple subjects (literacy or mathematics), English/language arts, history/social science, mathematics, science, art, music, physical education, world language, agriculture and (when development is completed) elementary literacy in a bilingual program. If the [new partner] offers credentials not covered by this list, the PACT leadership agrees to work with the [new partner] to develop additional Teaching Events to cover all credentials offered. The [new partner] may either choose to develop Embedded Signature Assessments to complement the Teaching Event or to use the Teaching Event as a stand-alone assessment.
The PACT consortium and its members will work together to scale up for full implementation -- both as an institution and as a consortium -- as of July 1, 2008 (the current implementation date required by law).
The [new partner] shares the PACT consortium’s commitment to working in collaboration to conduct research to further strengthen the reliability and validity of the PACT assessment process, and agrees to devote resources (human and fiscal as well as staff time) to piloting and scoring the PACT Teaching Event (TE) and to fully support the prospective teachers that will participate in the pilot. PACT has no funding to support implementation, but will provide program services and technical assistance to the [new partner] as a new partner. More specifically,
THE [NEW PARTNER] AGREES TO:
1. Administer the Teaching Events (by subject matter) as they are currently designed.
2. Ensure that all prospective teachers who will complete a Teaching Event will be supported in its development.
3. Assume responsibility for managing the consent process and collecting consent forms, especially for videotaping in schools.
4. Provide a lead trainer or collaborate with other PACT programs to secure a lead trainer for each credential area in which Teaching Events are being administered, to send local lead trainers to a two-day training, and to fully support ($$) faculty or staff’s participation in the PACT training events.
5. Make Teaching Events available for benchmarking and audit purposes, and participate in benchmarking activities.
6. Recruit faculty, staff, supervisors, graduate students (with teaching experience) or practicing teachers to be trained either to score the Teaching Event at the local campus or to participate in a regional training session with other PACT partners. Training and calibration require a two day commitment of scorers to meet the training requirements. Scorer recruitment must be sufficient to cover the [new partner]’s subject-specific campus scoring needs, including anticipated attrition due to failures or delays in calibration as well as double scoring for reliability checks.
7. If participating in a campus-based scoring model, recruit and contribute scorers to a centralized audit/moderation process to assess the consistency of local scoring across institutions. If participating in a regional scoring model, recruit and contribute scorers to a regional training and scoring in sufficient numbers to score all Teaching Events submitted by the [new partner] and double score those scoring just above, at, or below the passing standard.
8. Maintain candidate and scorer databases, including scores and requested demographic information, and provide information from the database to PACT to conduct analyses to examine the reliability and validity of the Teaching Event. Removal of names to afford candidate anonymity and confidentiality, as well as approval or exemption by the local human subject review committee will be the responsibility of the local campus.
9. Collaborate with PACT in conducting research to strengthen the validation of the PACT Teaching Event and to participate in the evaluation of the impact of PACT on faculty and students.
10. Share candidate data with PACT for research, subject to the constraints identified by the local Human Subjects review process.
11. Systematically collect all documentation to address the Standard 19 requirements.
12. Maintain records to document implementation and quality control procedures.
PACT LEADERSHIP WILL:
1. Coordinate any additional development or revision of Teaching Event Handbooks and rubrics, and post current versions on the PACT website.
2. Provide technical assistance to all IHE’s (including the [new partner]) in implementing, scoring, and analyzing results from the spring pilot.
3. Coordinate activities to identify benchmarks for Teaching Events in each subject area.
4. Coordinate training for lead trainers and conduct all training of trainer sessions. Note: training will occur either centrally or regionally.
5. Train selected faculty/supervisors in the audit/moderation processes used to establish the reliability of the Teaching Event(s).
6. Provide data analysis services to analyze the results of the pilot as well as provide electronic tools to enable each IHE to analyze their own data and exercise appropriate quality control measures.
7. Design and implement bias analyses to determine if the design of the assessment discriminates against any subgroup.
8. Develop technical reports to report on the scoring results and disseminate them to each PACT partner.
9. Collect all documentation (in collaboration with the partners) needed to address the standard 19 requirements and submit summary data to the Commission for review.
In addition, both the PACT leadership and the [new partner] agree to collaborate to either strengthen or adapt existing electronic systems that may already be in place at the campus or to facilitate the [new partner]’s participation in new technologies that are provided by G*STAR, UCOPIS, and TaskStream.
______
Raymond L. Pecheone , Dean
Director, PACT Education, [new partner]