Many people want to become teachers, and in order to do so, you must not only go through schooling, but you must also take an exam to be granted your license to teach. For those who wish to become a teacher in Ohio, you will be required to take the OAE Assessment of Professional Knowledge exam. The OAE Assessment exams are used to measure your knowledge and skills that are required to become a teacher in the state of Ohio.

The OAE Assessment of Professional Knowledge: Middle Childhood (4-9) is one of the many OAE Assessments that you can take to become an educator in Ohio. The OAE Assessment of Professional Knowledge: Middle Childhood (4-9) exam is a computer based exam that includes 100 multiple-choice questions along with 1 case study written assignment and 1 work product written assignment. It takes three hours to complete the exam and costs $105 to register to sit for the exam.

The OAE Assessment of Professional Knowledge: Middle Childhood (4-9) exam consists of three domains:

Domain I: Student Development and Learning

1. Demonstrate processes of human development, variations in student development, and how to apply this knowledge to provide instructional environments and experiences that promote all students’ development and learning.
2. Understand the learning processes and factors that can affect student learning and performance, and how to apply knowledge to provide instructional environments and experiences that promote all students’ learning and achievement.
3. Understand student diversity and how to provide learning opportunities and environments that are responsive to student differences, promote all students’ learning, and foster students’ appreciation of and respect for diversity.

Domain II: Assessment, Instruction, and the Learning Environment

1. Understand assessment instruments and practices, the relationship between assessment and instruction and how to use assessment to guide instruction and monitor students’ learning progress.
2. Understand principles and procedures of curricular and instructional planning and how to use effective planning to design instruction that promotes all students’ learning and achievement.
3. Understand principles and practices associated with various instructional approaches and how to apply these principles and practices to promote all students’ achievement of instructional goals.
4. Understand principles and practices of motivation and communication and how to apply these principles and practices effectively to promote students’ active engagement and learning.
5. Understand how to structure and manage the classroom to establish a safe, inclusive, and positive environment that is organized and productive; fosters excellence; and promotes learning, appropriate student behavior, and effective work habits.

Domain III: The Professional Environment

1. Understand how to establish partnerships and collaborate effectively with families to support student learning and for encouraging and facilitating the involvement of parents/guardians in their children’s education.
2. Understand roles and expectations of professional educators, legal and ethical guidelines, and strategies for continuous professional growth and self-reflection.

Scores

The passing score for the OAE Assessment of Professional Knowledge: Middle Childhood (4-9) exam is 220.

OAE Assessment of Professional Knowledge: Middle Childhood (4-9) Practice Questions

1. Hands-on, experiential learning activities can further adolescent cognitive and psychosocial development.  Which result of these activities is most likely to help preadolescents and younger adolescents resolve the conflict of Industry vs. Inferiority?

a. Transitioning from concrete to abstract thought
b. Having experiences of success in school activity
c. Forming future action plans they find satisfying
d. Transitioning from intuitive to logical reasoning

2. Which kinds of instructional approaches best address the developmental characteristics and needs of adolescents?

a. Providing hands-on, real-world, and authentic learning experiences
b. Providing narrower ranges of learning materials for focus and depth
c. Providing simpler, more concrete information, concepts, and humor
d. Providing traditional academic content to ensure strong foundations

3. Which of the following is true about teaching secondary school students how to conduct research for writing research papers?

a. In identifying sources, teaching students MLA, APA, or Turabian style will enable plagiarism.
b. In identifying sources, teaching students fair use and copyright laws can prevent plagiarism.
c. In identifying sources, teaching students about Creative Commons will guarantee plagiarism.
d. In identifying sources, teaching students to evaluate them is the sole way to stop plagiarism.

Answers

1. B: For preadolescents and younger adolescents to resolve Erikson’s psychosocial nuclear conflict of Industry vs. Inferiority (typically described as from age 7-12, but individual differences can make it earlier or later), they must experience success in school.  For students to transition from Piaget’s cognitive Concrete Operations to Formal Operations stage (a), teachers can start them with logical reasoning involving concrete manipulatives and then gradually progress, scaffolding as needed, to abstract reasoning without concrete objects. Forming action plans for the future that they find satisfying (c) is an activity that helps older adolescents to resolve Erikson’s psychosocial conflict of Identity vs. Role Confusion.  Students typically need to transition cognitively from intuitive thought to logical reasoning (d), i.e., from Piaget’s Preoperational to Concrete Operations stage, during early childhood, not adolescence.

2. A: Adolescents much prefer active, interactive, hands-on, real-world, and authentic learning experiences over passive, teacher-centered lessons that describe subjects without letting students experience them directly and learn by doing. Because of the wide variety of cognitive levels and interests among adolescents, teachers need to provide wide varieties of materials, not narrower ranges (b).  As adolescents develop abstract thought, teachers need to provide the more complex, abstract information, concepts, ideas, and sophisticated humor they can now appreciate rather than simpler, more concrete material (c). Teens, particularly young teens, are not as interested in traditional academic content (d) as in real-life and authentic learning.  They can learn the same content through more direct hands-on experiences, which make it more real and valuable to them, enabling better retention, generalization, transfer, and application to life.

3. B: When helping students conduct research for writing papers, it will not enable plagiarism to teach them MLA, APA, Turabian, or other official styles (a) of citing and listing references; rather, it will prevent it.  So will teaching students the regulations for fair use and copyright laws (b).  Teaching students about Creative Commons licensing will not guarantee plagiarism (c) but will help students avoid it when they use Creative Commons sources. Teaching students how to evaluate sources is not the only way of preventing plagiarism (d), but a way of helping students develop critical thinking skills they will use for the rest of their lives.