Student admission standards to be employed in selecting students for teacher training institutions and research on how admission standarts can be measured

The purpose of this study is to identify the student admission standards and performance indicators for teacher training institutions with respect to those who wish to become teachers and establish how such performance indicators can be measured. With this purpose in mind, the study is composed of two stages. The first stage involves the determination of the student admission standards for teacher training institutions. Here, the student admission standards for teacher training institutions are determined according to the three steps followed by the NBPTS (1999). Those steps include the designation of a group of experts, development of standards and review of standards. The group of experts for the study consists of 34 experts who meet the required criteria. In the second step, delphi technique has been employed in developing the standards. The last step where the standards have been reviewed has been concluded by using a screening model. The study has been conducted on 309 teaching professionals. The data has been gathered through the "Admission Standards Questionnaire" that was created during the first step. The questionnaire consists of questions intended for getting to know the teaching professionals participating in the study and of 56 articles fashioned as per the 5 Likert Type scale. The questionnaire thus created aims at identifying the degree of importance of the performance indicators. The data has been interpreted through using arithmetic mean and standard deviation values. The second stage of the study aims at establishing how the identified performance indicators can be measured. The study is a qualitative one. It employs criterion sampling method. The research population of the study consists of the experts that are included in the standard development step. A questionnaire form has been used as the tool for collecting data. Percentage and frequency have been employed for facilitating the analysis of the collected data. As a result of the first stage, 8 standard areas and 56 performance indicators have been identified as the student admission standards for teacher training institutions. Such standard areas are as follows; personality traits, interest, health, field knowledge, intellectual level, attitude, skills and technology. As a result of the second stage, a majority of the teaching professionals participating in the study has stated that the performance indicators designated for the personality traits standard area can be measured through personality tests, interviews and teacher observation reports. While interviews and interest inventory were regarded as significant in measuring the performance indicators designated for the interest standard area, psychological tests came into prominence in the health standard area. The most prominent implementation in measuring the performance indicators for the field knowledge standard area, however, was that of achievement tests. Other prominent alternative implementations were interviews in the intellectual level standard area, and teacher observation reports in the attitude, skills and technology standard areas respectively. Keywords: Standard, Admission Standards, Teacher Training, Affective Characteristics, Personality Traits