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 ...

Since 2007, substantial restructuring of New Zealand’s national school curriculum has occurred. This change has been paralleled by extensive revisions to New Zealand’s high-stakes assessment system, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), which makes the New Zealand context an important one for investigating how teachers come to terms with mandated assessment innovation. The New Zealand ...

This article describes the use of Rasch measurement to improve criteria-based analytical marking keys. The instruments and data described result from a research project which investigated the use and assessment of digital portfolios in the Western Australian senior secondary design course. The study involved two phases and two separate data sets. A criteria-based analytical marking ...