Assessment Literacy and Professional Learning

• In Event: Classroom Assessment and Assessment Literacy Practices to Support Equitable and Ambitious Teaching and Learning

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider what assessment literacy entails within this reconceptualization of assessments as supporting ambitious and equitable teaching and learning and how assessment literacy can be promoted among teachers. Throughout the paper, teachers are positioned as learners who are active agents in their own learning.

This paper first addresses classroom assessment in the context of a classroom activity system. Next, it presents an assessment literacy framework that organizes the knowledge and skills needed for high-quality classroom assessment (including learning goals, assessment evidence, and interpretation of student responses and action) and provides a practical application of teachers’ assessment literacy knowledge and skills in an example from a Grade 8 art lesson. It then presents a set of enabling components for teacher professional learning along with examples of how they can be enacted in practice to support the development of teachers’ assessment literacy (see Figure 1). Ambitious teaching is centered by the assessment literacy skills that teachers need to acquire (learning goals, assessment evidence, and interpretation and action). Learning supports (including learning communities, classroom observations, and inquiry-cycles), deliberate practice, and sociocultural consciousness and agency provide the enabling conditions to promote teachers’ assessment literacy. Finally, this paper specifically addresses the role of school/district leaders and state policy in providing support for assessment literacy.

Authors

• Caroline Wylie, Center for Assessment

• Margaret Heritage, Heritage Consulting