Editorial

This special issue of Assessment Matters presents the findings from an extensive, multi-year, multi-site investigation of how initial teacher education students develop the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and dispositions to become competent assessors of student progress. The project, “Learning to Become ‘Assessment Capable’ Teachers”, was conducted at four universities in New Zealand and looked at the growth of student teachers in assessment capability at both the early childhood and primary levels. As such, this research focused on two critical issues in education today: classroom assessment and teacher development. In this set of articles, we have the opportunity to learn much about each of these issues. This mixed-methods project employed multiple administrations of a questionnaire about assessment beliefs combined with a series of focus groups and analysis of documents produced over the course of the project.