Measuring K-5 Teacher Understanding of the CSTA Teacher Standards
By Joe Tise, Senior Education Researcher
Measuring K-5 Teacher Understanding
Education is most effective when we use measures that produce reliable data and show evidence of validity. Most people immediately consider measures of student learning, but measures of teacher learning and skills are equally important. To help teachers guide their professional development (PD), the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) developed the Standards for Computer Science Teachers (or Teacher Standards; CSTA, 2020).
Why Vignettes?
Providing a way for teachers to understand their proficiency and identify potential areas for growth requires a delicate balance between objectivity and authenticity. On the one hand, our prior work on this front leveraged teacher observations and classroom artifacts—both of which capture teacher behaviors in real-world contexts. But, as our previous research concluded, this approach is time and labor intensive for both teachers and researchers, and simply not scalable. On the other hand, self-report measures of proficiency (e.g., self-efficacy) are easily scalable, quick to score, and readily available. But they lack context and rely on teachers’ perceptions of their skills–which may or may not match actual skills. Vignettes strike a balance in producing contextualized, scalable assessment.
To assist teachers along their PD journeys, IACE teamed up with CSTA to develop measures of teacher proficiencies aligned to the CSTA Teacher Standards. Last year, 111 K-5 CS teachers participated in our pilot study. Our findings were recently published in the proceedings of the 2026 SIGCSE Technical Symposium.
Standards for CS Teachers
Results from Our Pilot Study
Our vignettes-based assessment comprised 21 multiple-choice items, each aligned to one or more indicators of CSTA Teacher Standards 2, 4, or 5. Item statistics (such as discrimination and difficulty) give us a preliminary glance at the utility and quality of the assessment. Overall, we found the items were relatively easy for our pilot sample, but nevertheless produced moderate levels of discrimination (i.e., ability to identify higher- vs. lower-performers on the assessment).
Does the Assessment Relate to Teacher Characteristics?
We also found (through a multiple linear regression model) that for our sample, none of the teacher characteristics (like number of awards received or years of experience) significantly predicted scores on the assessment. This was disappointing, because significant relationships would have provided further evidence of validity for our measure. However, our sample was not as representative (demographically) as we had liked given that all were attending a weeklong CS professional development. This may have influenced our results.
Looking to What’s Next
Our pilot study provided us a number of critical insights, which we are using to refine the assessment. The final version of the assessment will be ready for broader use in June 2026.
Read the Full Paper!
Joseph C. Tise, Monica M. McGill, Vicky Sedgwick, Laycee Thigpen, and Amanda Bell. 2026. Piloting a Vignettes Assessment to Measure K-5 CS Teacher Proficiencies and Growth. Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V.1. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1054–1060. https://doi.org/10.1145/3770762.3772604
References
Computer Science Teachers Association (2020). Standards for Computer Science Teachers. Retrieved from https://csteachers.org/teacherstandards.