Meritocracy embodies tension(s) between its egalitarian and elitist strands, which in turn construct how “fairness” is construed in terms of educational opportunity and outcome. In this article, two conflicting notions of fairness are identified, and the dialectic tension and relationship(s) between each are explored. Assessment practices in schools, in particular those pertaining to notions of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Gayle Eyers reviews Lorna M. Earl. (2013). Assessment as learning: Using classroom assessment to maximize student learning (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. 144 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4522-4297-2.

Gordon Stobart reviews Valentina Klenowski and Claire Wyatt-Smith. (2014). Assessment for education: Standards, judgement and moderation. Sage Publications, 171 pp. ISBN 978-1-4462-0841-0.

Assessment practices in higher education focus on evaluating student learning. Institutions are now expected to provide improvement-oriented assessments that help students to improve their work. Student learning outcomes are enhanced if students understand assessment and respond to it in a self-regulating fashion. Beliefs about assessment have been shown to have adaptive and maladaptive relationships to assessment ...

This article details the use of Q methodology (Q) for eliciting different views of classroom assessment among Singaporean teachers. Q is purported to be useful for studying the tacit decision-making process within the wide-ranging practical and controversial situations that Q researchers tend to prefer to investigate. This article asks a key question: Is Q helpful ...