Assessment Matters 7: 2014 Special Issue

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… Read more

This was a 3-year project that followed a cohort of initial teacher education (ITE) students from four universities over their 3-year programme. The project, “Learning to Become ‘Assessment Capable’ Teachers”, focused on the development of the students’ understandings of, beliefs about, and practices in assessment in primary and early childhood (ECE) settings. The project was intended to be formative by engaging teacher educators responsible for teaching… Read more

This article examines conceptions of assessment in early childhood initial teacher education (ITE) students’ learning and relative to assessment policy and practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dominant conceptions of assessment were identified in participants’ discussions about their own assessment learning in ITE. These were then compared with students’ beliefs about assessment and descriptions of assessment practices involving them. Assessment conceptions related… Read more

This study examined how students’ beliefs about assessment changed over the 3 years of a primary teacher education programme in which assessment is taught in an embedded fashion as compared to a dedicated assessment course. Data were taken from Likert-type items from the “Beliefs About Assessment” questionnaire (see Hill, Cowie, Gilmore, & Smith, 2010), three student focus groups, and two teacher educator conversations. Results indicated that in the first… Read more

Teacher assessment is now understood as central to curriculum reform and a key factor in responsive pedagogy. This article discusses one aspect of a 3-year investigation into the development of student teacher assessment capability. In the full study, data were collected through questionnaires and focus groups. This article reports on the assessment-learning trajectory of three student teachers at three points over the course of their 3-year primary teacher… Read more

As teachers in initial teacher education (ITE), we need to understand the influence of our teacher education curriculum on ITE student learning. Participating in the “Learning to Become ‘Assessment Capable’ Teachers” project provided us with the opportunity to investigate the extent to which the assessment learning of one cohort of ITE students was aligned with the learning objectives of the assessment curriculum. Using the learning objectives of the assessment… Read more