Book Review on Evaluation of Teacher Preparation Programs

This article is a book review article. This is an academic work on the evaluation of teacher preparation courses by scholars at American academic institutions. This book contains four chapters on the purpose and context of teacher preparation plans and principled evaluations, sources of evidence involved in evaluations, designing appropriate evaluation methods for purposes, and decision-making frameworks. The research in this book uses qualitative research methods to accomplish its primary goal: to clarify the complexities of evaluating teacher education programs and to suggest a potential decision-making framework for designing improved evaluations in the future. The findings build a decision-making framework covering seven key issues to help assessors design evaluation solutions that are appropriate to specific contexts. At the same time, the reader’s attention is shifted from the use of evaluation systems to improve the quality of teacher preparation program results to higher-level reflection, leading readers to reflect on issues such as diversity and inclusion, educational equity, and non-cognitive factors, etc.