Assessment Education: Partnership Responsibilities and Conceptualizations

• In Event: 45.047 - The Current Context for Assessment Education in Preservice Preparatory Programs: A Symposium of International Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives: This paper explores and raises questions about the appropriate focus of assessment education in pre-service education and how universities and schools might more productively share the responsibility for supporting pre-service teachers in developing their beliefs and practices.

Perspective: Within our pre-service course, we present formative assessment as teachers making frequent, interactive assessments of student understanding, which enables them to adjust their teaching to meet individual student needs (Author f; Author g). Our interest lies in how pre-service teachers build their beliefs and practices in classroom assessment. When teachers have higher levels of self-efficacy, they tend to use effective teaching behaviors more often, (Caprara, Barbaranelli, Steca, & Malone, 2006) but how this plays out when responsibility for training is shared between two different agencies is unknown.

Methods: Data was gathered through semi-structured interview with five school-based mentors and through a focus discussion group with their five pre-service mentees towards the end of the training year. The methodological approach is underpinned by a social constructionist inquiry (Crotty, 1998) with a basic assumption that knowledge and action are fundamentally social in origin and rooted in particular ecologies. Analysis was done using open coding by searching for common threads. Initial themes were identified, described, applied and validated through an iterative process.

Results: Three main themes arose - practices, marking and testing. Mentors noted that pre-service teachers quickly adopted the classroom assessment practices of their respective schools. What was less clear was how pre-service teachers developed the capability to do this. Within schools, there is a strong emphasis on individuality of practices, with few opportunities for collaborative decisions or consensus between teachers. Yet, common tests are given in these schools, and much was standardized about testing procedures. The evidence indicates that competence is judged in terms of knowledge of assessment purposes, a clear sense of learning targets and students' ability level (Pollock, 2011), rather than how to support student progress in the classroom.
Pre-service teachers felt that they were invading a system where there were set regimes to quickly understand and adapt to fit in with the ideas from their university course. During practicum, they saw assessment as a set of practices to exhibit and make explicit in their teaching rather than a means of collecting evidence to inform learning.
Mentors viewed ideas about assessment as introduced in university-based sessions and judged competency in situ. Such an approach means that pre-service teachers make sense of assessment practices experientially rather than being apprenticed into them, with capability being seen as an outcome rather than development.
Assessment conversations were entangled with concerns about expectations of 'knowledge acquisition' and this led pre-service teachers to adopt separate regimes for demonstrating their 'competences' to mentors to those they used to examine evidence to inform learning.

Significance: Understanding how teachers are guided in developing assessment capability is one part of providing an initial theoretical and descriptive foundation for future research and course development in classroom assessment.

Author

• Christine Harrison, Kings College, London