Improving Admission Decisions for a Teacher Training Program: The Case of a Multilingual and Multicultural Environment

Higher education institutions across the world use a combination of previous grades along with scores on verbal and quantitative aptitude tests in making admissions decisions for their various academic programs. Recent work suggests there are several additional factors that would likely add to the predictive validity of the admissions system, and be more fair to candidates (Harackiewicz et. al, 2002). These include measures of personality, creativity, situational judgment, critical thinking, and others (Kyllonen, 2005). Consequently, over the past several years, numerous programs in the U.S. and elsewhere have experimented with potential alternative or supplementary predictors (Peeters and Lievens, 2005; Kyllonen, 2008). The University of Luxembourg, in particular the Bachelor of Science in Education (BScE) program, will contribute to this debate by exploring and validating alternative/supplementary measures of social competency – in this case measures that gauge the potential for college success and capacity for effective teaching. Our study seeks to identify valid and reliable indicators of not only future academic success in the BScE program, but also of becoming an effective primary school teacher. Overall the goal of our project is: a) to consider what it means to be successful in school and as a teacher (and the measurement of these successful outcomes); b) to identify the most important constructs that will predict success in the BScE program; c) to examine alternative measures of these constructs with respect to psychometric properties, administrative and logistical concerns, and user acceptance, and d) to conduct a validity study examining the predictive validity of various candidate new measures in predicting successful outcomes. To accomplish this we use a sample of BScE program candidates that took a newly revised admissions exam in the summer of 2011, designed to measure both cognitive and noncognitive attributes. The composition of these candidates was made up of self-selected/self-motivated persons seeking admission to the BScE program, whose main objective is to train and prepare future primary school teachers. On average the BScE program receives yearly approximately 400 registration applications, of which about 300 complete the exam. The average age tends to be between 19 and 20 years; it is approximately 70% female; comes mostly from the classique (nearly 70%) and the technique (25%) academic tracks; and over 90% of the candidates are of Luxembourgish nationality. The noncognitive section of the exam measured basic socio-demographic characteristics and a host of social competencies ranging from personality, time management, team-work, individual adaptability, conscientiousness, teaching self-efficacy, and other attitudes and beliefs. Because some these measures are new in the multilingual context of Luxembourg, they had to be translated from English into French and German; thus requiring further investigation to establish their reliability and validity as predictors of future performance. With that in mind, this paper will report our findings investigating the psychometric and other statistical properties of our noncognitive measures. Moreover, we will report how these measures help profile successful students relative to two important validation criteria – their course grades and in-classroom teaching evaluations – measures of college success and effective teaching.