A validation study of the Teacher Collaboration Assessment Survey

Although teacher collaboration is a school improvement imperative, it persists as an under-empiricized construct that has proven difficult to establish and assess with certainty. In this article, the authors present a validation study of the Teacher Collaboration Assessment Survey (TCAS). The TCAS operationalizes and measures 4 key domains of teacher collaboration: dialogue, decision making, action, and evaluation, and has been used to examine the quality of teacher teaming in district-wide comprehensive school reform efforts in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. Five sources of validity evidence recommended by Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, & NCME, 1999) are explicated, which establish a strong argument in support of the instruments' validity. The authors discuss how educational leaders and researchers can use the TCAS for leveraging teacher collaboration for instructional innovation and student achievement, and to systematically examine teacher teaming and its relationship to other educational outcomes.