Abstract
Practicum poses great challenges for pre-service teachers who learn to assess because their conceptions of assessment (CoA) may undergo dramatic changes. This multiple case study reports on how three pre-service teachers’ CoA changed over practicum at a primary school in China. Findings show that pre-service teachers’ CoA have experienced a rapid change from a superficial perception of assessment for academic achievement and moral character development, to a more comprehensive understanding of varied assessment purposes, constructs in assessment criteria, feedback, fairness in classroom assessment, and students’ involvement in and engagement with assessment. A range of factors are found to have exerted varying degrees of influence on these conception changes, such as personal factor (i.e., agency in assessment), experiential factors (i.e., school-based assessment practices, interactions with students, and (anti-)apprenticeship of observation about assessment) and contextual factors (i.e., mentoring, classroom reality, school assessment culture, and national assessment policy). These findings are discussed in terms of how these changes are diverse but limited, as well as how the mediating factors have exerted differentiated influences in positive or negative ways. This paper concludes with implications for research on teachers’ CoA and professional development for assessment literacy.
Highlights
Against the background of the increasing accountability of student learning and the rising importance of assessment for learning across school levels and contexts, there is a pressing need for preparing assessment-literate teachers (DeLuca et al, 2016; Popham, 2018)
To understand the trajectory of pre-service teachers’ conception of assessments (CoAs) change during practicum, we extend our review to research on their general conception change in this period
Zhao was an underachieving student without much enthusiasm for teaching. His CoA changes were featured with a low starting point and limited development after the practicum
Summary
Against the background of the increasing accountability of student learning and the rising importance of assessment for learning across school levels and contexts, there is a pressing need for preparing assessment-literate teachers (DeLuca et al, 2016; Popham, 2018). In China, teachers are placed within tensions between a strong testing tradition that used high-stakes exams for selection and ranking purposes (Carless, 2011; Chen and Brown, 2018) and liberal educational reforms featuring assessment for learning [Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (MOE), 2011, 2017]. Such tensions indicate that preparing assessment-literate teachers is by no means an easy task. Learning to assess is one of the most important yet challenging tasks for pre-service teachers
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