Assessing readiness with the AAA Tool

The Assessing Attitudes and Aptitudes Tool (AAA) is an instrument that has been used to assess educator attitudes, self-perceived skills, and behaviors regarding the main aspects of interactive pedagogy that encourages students' critical thinking in schools and districts in the United States and internationally, in other words, their readiness to engage in new instructional practices. This instrument is used to perform beginning needs assessments and readiness assessments—resulting in strategic plans for teacher training and professional development. It can also be used as a pretest and a posttest to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher-training programs—comparing readiness levels at the beginning with those after the program.

The instrument consists of statements regarding principles and practices of effective instruction in these topic areas:

• Education concepts and philosophies
• Principles of student learning
• Curriculum development
• Instructional methods
• Assessment of student progress

There are forty-one statements in which respondents are asked to respond to two questions: (1) how important is this? (measuring attitude) and (2) how is it reflected in your practice? (or your self-rating) (measuring skills). There are two responses required for each statement in sections A–E: one that is a measure of attitude and the other of self-perceived skill. The instrument has content validity and, as such, reflects the vision of numerous educators. You can use either the entire instrument or select the items that are most relevant to the instructional improvements you are trying to lead.

The surveys are administered anonymously. The resulting data can therefore inform four aspects of your strategy:

1. How ready the respondents are to participate in instructional improvement in each instructional topic area (the total mean score for all questions in each section). If the readiness is high, you're good to go.
2. If the readiness is not as high as you'd like, where does it need bolstering?
   1. Attitudes (mean score of the perceived importance items).
   2. Skills (mean score of the perceived self-ratings or degree reflected in practice).

      There are different activities needed to raise readiness depending if what's needed is better appreciation for importance (the need to demonstrate how and why the specific activity leads to better instruction) or skills (the importance is appreciated but participants don't know how to pull it off, so skills training would be in order).

3. For which items do attitudes need improvement? For which are skills development needed? (item analyses)
4. When a second administration is done at a benchmark time, have attitudes and skills improved? (pre-post analysis)

Here's a summary of the AAA data and to what uses it can be put.

The Assessing Attitudes and Aptitudes (AAA) Tool

Note: A Google Docs version of this tool is online at. https://drive.google.com/templates?view=public&authorId=09213941696829242278

To access the tool from this URL, click on “Use this template.” Click on “File” and “Make a copy” to create a copy of the tool for you to send to those you are asking to respond. Next, click on “File” and “Send form.” A pop-up box will appear which will allow you to send the form via e-mail and also provides you with a link to the survey that you can embed in your own cover e-mail.

Once respondents have completed the survey, you will find a summary of their responses by clicking on “Reponses” and then “Summary of responses.”

The following statements reflect various philosophies of education. By blackening the appropriate circle on the answer sheet that corresponds to the number of the question, please indicate (1) how important you believe the concept to be and (2) your assessment of the degree to which your current practice reflects this concept.

Here is the paper and pencil version of the tool.

Instructions for Respondents.

Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Useful Analyses

There are many analyses that can be done with the data to tell the leader about the readiness of the respondents for instructional improvements and what activities that might be considered as a result. Here are a couple:

Item Analyses

Attitudes (high scores are between 4 and 3; low scores are between 1 and 2)

• Which are the sections or items with the highest attitude ratings? What are those average scores? Building on these is a good idea.
• Which are the sections or items with the lowest attitude ratings? How low are they (what are the scores)? Might these attitudes disrupt the instruction strategy? If so, how will you seek to improve them?

Skills (high scores are between 4 and 3; low scores are between 1 and 2)

• Which are the sections or items with the highest skills ratings? What are those average scores? Building on these is a good idea.
• Which are the sections or items with the lowest skills ratings? How low are they (what are the scores)? Might these skills disrupt the instruction strategy? If so, how will you seek to improve them?

Readiness assessment: Attitudes plus skills overall (for each section)

• Quadrant I: Low scores for both attitudes and skills. These are means of 1.4 and below for both skill and attitude. Or 100% rating 1 or 2 for both attitude and skills if you are using the URL.
• The implication here is that you will need to do both skill building and attitude improvement. Again, early wins—and peer pressure—will be needed.
• Quadrant II: High scores for attitudes, but low scores for skills. These are average scores of 3.5 and above for attitude and below 1.5 for skill. Or 100% rating 4 or 3 for attitude with 100% rating 1 or 2 for skills if you are using the URL version.
• The implication here is that, with some professional development, these folks should be good contributors.
• Quadrant III: High scores for both skills and attitudes? These are average scores of 3.5 and above for both attitudes and skills. Or 100% having scores of 3 or 4 for both (if you're using the URL at the front of this chapter).

  The implication here is that, with these folks, you're ready to go.

• Quadrant IV: Low scores for attitudes, but high scores for skills. These are average scores of 3.5 and above for skills and below 1.5 for attitude. Or 100% rating 1 or 2 for attitude with 100% rating 3 or 4 for skills.

The implication here is that you will need to convince these participants of the value of the endeavor, and when that happens, they will be up to the task. Early wins work well here.

One final note: Please be aware that you might be surprised at what you learn from using this tool. Many principals have reported that assessing readiness has been the single most important activity they have done when planning strategies to improve instruction. Several principals have often found that ideas that seemed exciting and worthwhile were spurned by faculty as adding too much extra work—and that other activities would have to be foregone.

On the other hand, a principal who thought the teachers would not want one more activity on their plate was pleasantly surprised to find out that they were ready and willing to include a new reading program in the year's curriculum. Another principal learned that there was big support at his elementary school for piloting a “departmental” approach, rather than having one teacher stay with the same class all day. Testing these assumptions is always a good idea.