Fall 2006 Archived FAQ's

We have provided you an archived copy of the Fall 2006 FAQ's as a reference document. As many changes were made to the TPA between the Fall 06 and Spring 07 submissions, you may find it helpful to consult the Fall FAQ's to remind yourself of the submission process that you used during the collection. We have grayed-out the font of the Fall 2006 FAQ's to ensure that they cannot be mistaken for the Spring 2006 FAQ's.

If your institution has students beginning, continuing, and/or exiting a Teacher Education Program for a reporting year and period, you are required to submit data as stated by SCHEV's report calendar.

Each reporting year and period in which you have students being formally admitted into, currently enrolled, and/or exiting a Teacher Education Program, you will need to submit a file. Typically, you will have at least two submissions per year: Fall and Spring. Please check SCHEV's reports calendar for information on submission dates.

As indicated in the TPA documentation, there are three submissions: one for Beginning Students, one for Continuing Students, and one for Exiting students. Please consult SCHEV's reports calendar for submission dates. Over the next couple of years, you will likely be submitting all three records every term. The records have similar fields so the work done to prepare the Beginning Student file will ease the work needed to create the other files. View an example of the TPA process flow diagram (PDF, 76K) to see how the other two record types concur with the current beginning student records.

No. You should only enter those who have been admitted to the program this Fall.

Yes. Many schools have reported that there is not an easy way to identify these students. The TPA should include these students along with the date they were formally admitted and enrolled in a teacher education program. Based on conversations with other schools, the process of flagging these students for inclusion in the TPA may be a manual one. It seems that only the School of Education or the Career Switcher program would know the existing students who are new to licensure. Once these students were flagged, this information must be relayed to the persons at your institution responsible for collecting all the data and submitting it to SCHEV.

Enter all the data you currently collect and make plans to collect the fields in the future.

If the students have been Formally Admitted to and Enrolled in a Teacher Education Program, they should be included in the TPA submission. In particular, Career-switchers are typically non-credit students and they should definitely be included in the TPA submission. Your institution may submit both your traditional and career-switchers students together in one file; however, if your submission schedules differ or your programs operate so distinctly that submitting one file is not practical, SCHEV may choose to provide the career-switcher program a separate login so that they can submit data files separately

The TPA is a research database and the fields of interest may not exactly match those required for state licensure. Many institutions still will require Praxis I for their own admissions process even it is not a requirement for state licensure. If you institution neither requires nor collects the scores, you will just mark them as unavailable when entering data into the TPA.

You may omit Praxis I scores by marking them as not available if the student did not take the Praxis I. The reports that will be generated by the TEAL II System will provide you with data that indicate the percentage of students that pass the Praxis I as a result of taking the Praxis I as well as the percentage of students who passed the Praxis I using the alternative SAT or ACT scores.

A long term solution will be devised. For the Fall 2006 submission, your institution could enter a generic SAT test date for your students in order to submit your scores. Keep in mind that for tests without a Writing score, the date must be prior to March 1, 2005; tests with a Writing score reported must have a date of March 1, 2005, or later.

No, there is no direct transfer of data from your institutions database(s) to the SCHEV TPA system. Your institution may either manually enter records using the HTML forms provided on the TPA site, or your institution may create a file to upload to SCHEV. Ideally, your institution will create a repeatable process to export the data from your institutions database(s) into the one of the template formats provided on the TPA site: Access database table, Excel worksheet, or pipe-delimited text file.

You may create either an Access table, an Excel worksheet, or a pipe-delimited text file to submit to SCHEV. Please note that other SCHEV submissions required fixed-length text files, but the TPA allows pipe-delimited text files.

Depending upon the current availability of support from your Institutional Research department, you may find it easier to enter the records using the online HTML forms for this data collection and work towards being able to create an upload file for the future data collection of TPA Beginning Students. The TPA now provides a way to export the data you enter for your records, although the export is not in a format that could later be uploaded. Creating a repeatable process to generate an upload file initially takes more work, but will be beneficial over time. The Beginning Student data collection has the largest number of fields of three TPA files that are collected. A lot of the work to create the repeatable upload process for the Beginning Student file can be leveraged for the Continuing and Exiting student files to be submitted in the future. Additionally, if your institution currently submits other files to SCHEV, that work may be leveraged to create your Beginning Student file.

The HTML entry forms for entering a student record are designed to be completed in one sitting. Your data will not be saved until you complete the last screen. If you have entered several screens and cannot proceed because you do not know the correct value of a particular field, enter a temporary value so you can proceed and save the record, make note of that field, and then use the "Update Student Data" tab to go back and edit your record after you locate the correct information. View the TPA data entry screens (PDF, 3,725K).

Check with your institution to see whether you have submitted files to SCHEV before such as the Fall Headcount file. You may be able to leverage the experience of preparing that file to prepare the new file. Please also refer to the Technical Assistance and Case Studies sections for more ideas.

You may upload the same file multiple times before locking it. Each time you upload the file (for instance TPA Beginning Students Fall 2006-07) it will overwrite what you previously uploaded. For any other testing needed, please contact SCHEV.

Locking your data means that you have entered all relevant records for that record type reporting year and period (for example, all TPA Beginning Students for Fall 2006-07), reviewed them to ensure completeness and accuracy, and will have no further changes to the data submitted. Once data is locked, it signifies to SCHEV that the data can be moved to the research database. You must lock one set of records before you will be able to enter any other data. If you lock your data prematurely, you must contact SCHEV; the application will not allow you to unlock data.

If you are using the HTML forms for data entry, go to the "Update Student Data" tab, and find the record you want to delete. At the bottom of the edit screens, there is a delete button to remove that one record. If you are uploading data, remove the unwanted row from the spreadsheet you originally uploaded and then upload the corrected spreadsheet.

If you mistakenly submit your spreadsheet for Summer Beginning Students rather than Spring, upload a blank spreadsheet. You will receive a status of "Finished - General/System Error" with a link to the error message "The file you uploaded contained no records. Any records previously entered for this record type, reporting year, and reporting period were removed. Please upload a new file." This will erase all the records from the wrong location and allow you to enter records in the correct place

Whether you entered a group of records using the HTML forms or uploaded a spreadsheet of data, you may remove all your records by uploading a blank Excel spreadsheet for that record type, reporting year, and reporting period. You will receive a status of "Finished - General/System Error" with a link to the error message "The file you uploaded contained no records. Any records previously entered for this record type, reporting year, and reporting period were removed. Please upload a new file." This will erase all the records from the wrong location and allow you to enter records in the correct place

Robert Lapsley at SCHEV. He may be reached at RobertLapsley@schev.edu.