Kindergarten administration and faculty agreement on measuring educational effectiveness and proficiency

Abstract

Background: The way we usually assess kindergarten teachers, their competence and how they actually perform in class, has often depended on only one kind of rater, like teachers doing a self-evaluation on their own or administrators giving a one-sided judgement. In many cases this ends up bringing rather subjective results. Also, “multi-rater” methods still seem to be used very seldom in early childhood education (ECE) studies at the national level, so there is this clear gap in what we know about whether teachers’ and administrators’ views line up or they quietly move apart. Objective: The aim here is to compare how kindergarten teachers and administrators assess teachers’ classroom competence and daily performance, and then judge how much they match , meaning the agreement level between these two groups of raters. Method: We used a quantitative, cross-sectional setup, and we recruited people with purposeful (non-probability) sampling. In total there were 280 participants, 170 kindergarten teachers and 110 principals, all from across the country. For data collection, we used a structured survey questionnaire. To check inter-rater agreement between teachers and administrators, Cohen’s Kappa coefficient was applied. For spotting meaningful differences between the groups’ perceptions, we ran a Pearson Chi-Square test. Teachers’ competencies were also looked at through a combined examination, including subjective questions plus case analysis, meant to evaluate performance as well as the teachers’ own self-view about cognitive skills. For the personal and group side of evaluation, self-evaluation questionnaires and autobiographical reflections were organized around fixed topics. At the same time, an instructor used a standardized assessment rubric, in order to monitor student advancement during the entire teaching-learning flow. Result: The findings pointed toward a general disagreement, kind of between teachers and principals, you know, shown by the low Cohen’s Kappa scores, which then means they seem to have divergent angles about teacher competence. The Pearson Chi- Square test also went ahead and confirmed statistically significant differences between what the two groups of raters said about the assessments. Conclusion: Kindergarten teachers together with administrators appear to hold different perceptions of teachers’ classroom competence and performance, and this also spotlights the limits of those single-rater evaluation models. Overall, the results basically reinforce how useful multi-rater approaches can be, like mixing self assessment, rubric driven observation, and administrative review, so you get a more whole and neutral picture of teacher effectiveness in ECE environments.