Developing assessment capable teachers in this age of accountability

Over the past two decades, a global movement towards accountability in education has emerged. This movement is marked by government demands for ever higher academic standards and commensurate student achievement throughout education systems, and the proliferation of student assessments at all levels – classroom, district, state, national and international (Nichols & Harris, 2016; Stobart, 2008). Accountability has become the prevailing watchword, with teacher assessment capability (and assessment literacy) now considered a fundamental competency for all educators (Popham, 2009; Xu & Brown, 2016). Educational policies and professional standards throughout the world call for educators to integrate assessments throughout instruction to support, monitor and report on student learning, and to use summative forms of assessment to document and demonstrate achievement of educational standards (DeLuca, LaPointe-McEwan, & Luhanga, 2016; Gotch & French, 2014). The accountability movement is supported by educational research that confirms assessment-based teaching as a potentially effective educational strategy to improve student achievement (e.g. Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hattie, 2009).

Stressing the importance of assessment literacy, James Popham (2009, p. 4) notes ‘educators’ inadequate knowledge in assessment can cripple the quality of education. Assessment literacy is seen as a sine qua non for today’s competent educator’. Likewise, Johnson (2011, p. 121), in the context of summative assessment for system monitoring, observes that ‘the increasing politicisation of assessment over recent decades has strengthened [the] need for a high degree of assessment literacy among practitioners and others involved in the business of education’. DeLuca and Bellara (2013) further comment that as the landscape of educational assessment changes to include accountability mandates and standards-based teaching but also student-centred pedagogies and student-directed assessments, ‘there is a continued need to shift preservice assessment education experiences that prepare teachers to embrace multiple purposes and practices of assessment in schools’ (p. 367).

Despite these widespread calls for assessment capable teachers, research indicates that teachers generally maintain low levels of assessment knowledge and skills, with beginning teachers particularly unprepared for assessment in schools (DeLuca & Klinger, 2010; MacLellan, 2004). This persistent finding is unsurprising as assessment has historically been a neglected area of study in teacher education programmes, at least in Anglophone countries (La Marca, 2006; Shepard, Hammerness, Darling-Hammond, & Rust, 2005; Stiggins, 1999; Taras, 2007). Moreover, current teacher education models maintain several challenges for supporting teacher candidates’ and initial teachers’ developing conceptions and practices of assessment. The often short and fragmented (i.e. on-campus versus practicum) structure of teacher education programmes, diversity of instructors and variability in their approaches to assessment, and competing learning priorities limit the consistency and prominence of effective assessment education within initial preparatory programmes (DeLuca & Volante, 2016; Taras, 2007). Instructors’ own levels of assessment capability might also, in some cases, be lacking.

Once in field, and especially within their first five years, beginning teachers work to establish confidence across their practice with explicit professional learning in assessment not always accessible or available. Instead, practising teachers tend to learn about assessment through collaboration and discussions with colleagues, and adapt to in-school assessment routines and cultures. However, how effective this learning is – how similarly and how consistently teachers are able to apply criteria-based standards of judgement when evaluating evidence of student learning and achievement – is rarely systematically researched, even in high-stakes assessment contexts (Johnson, 2013).

Accordingly, we situate this special issue amid these professional learning challenges and with the aim to present cutting-edge research into assessment education – to provoke innovative and effective approaches to supporting teacher assessment capability from pre-service to in-service. To this end, this collection includes nine articles from a variety of different countries: Australia and New Zealand, along with Germany, Ireland, Norway, Scotland and Switzerland. Combined, the articles discuss opportunities for enhancing teacher education programming at institutional and system levels.

Innovative approaches to pre-service assessment education are described in seven of the papers: Brevik, Blikstad-Balas and Engelien; Cowie and Cooper; Edwards; Hill and colleagues; Mottier Lopez and Pasquini; Schneider and Bodensohn; and Wyatt-Smith and colleagues. Across these papers, we see a consistent emphasis on encouraging teacher candidates to cultivate their understandings of assessment by using critical reflective practices rooted in Assessment for Learning (AfL) principles to support their own development. This recursive form of learning (i.e. learning assessment by using assessment for your own learning) is counter-intuitive for many teacher candidates who are initially preoccupied with the assessment of students, as evidenced in the Norwegian study. Through ongoing criterion-referenced self-assessment and the interrogation of controversial assessment incidences, these papers advocate for the active use of assessment strategies in the development of assessment capable teachers. The paper by Wyatt-Smith and colleagues further extends this argument by invoking the need for systemic cohesion across sites of assessment education. In particular, the authors describe a process of aligning learning criteria across universities and external agencies to enable a consistent message and collective effort in supporting initial teacher learning in assessment. The final two papers, by Lysaght and O’Leary on one hand, and Livingston and Hutchinson on the other, focus on teachers’ continuing professional development once in-service. Both papers invite us to consider the factors and structures that enable continued assessment education once teachers are in career, and pose significant questions that challenge conventional notions of professional development.

Christoph Schneider and Rainer Bodensohn, in their paper ‘Student teachers’ appraisal of the importance of assessment in teacher education and self-reports on the development of assessment competence’, describe an empirical study focused on teacher candidates’ perceptions towards assessment learning in their pre-service programme in Germany. This country context is particularly interesting as assessment has traditionally featured alongside curriculum and pedagogy in initial teacher education programmes in many German universities; hence teacher candidates are able to comment on the relative importance and valuing of assessment in relation to other programme content. In Schneider and Bodensohn’s study, over 900 teacher candidates rated the importance of each of the official assessment standards that underpinned their training programme, and recorded the frequency with which they believed they behaved in accordance with the standards in practicum situations. Their analyses revealed that teacher candidates perceive assessment as a distinct domain and assign high rating to the importance and value of this domain in pre-service education programmes. We position this article first in this special issue as a baseline for thinking about pre-service and in-service assessment education. Clearly, the topic is one valued by teacher candidates and therefore deserves purposeful attention and planning.

In ‘Exploring the challenge of developing student teacher data literacy’, Bronwen Cowie and Beverley Cooper reiterate the need for more informed teacher data use, including advocacy for formative assessment and the need for teachers to account for student learning within the New Zealand context. In this paper, Cowie and Cooper point to challenges, relevant in their contexts and others, related to developing teacher candidates’ and teachers’ assessment and data literacy. Specifically, they argue that a dominant impediment is the fact that teachers might not have a sufficient prior grounding in basic mathematics and statistics to fully use data in meaningful ways. The paper reports lecturer, teacher candidate and school leader views of the role and requirements of data literacy using data from a larger New Zealand study into how to foster student-teacher mathematical thinking for the breadth of teacher professional work. Their findings suggest a concern and opportunity to develop assessment and data literacy through mathematical and statistical understandings. For us, this suggests that assessment education is not a stand-alone topic; rather it has relevant cognates in curriculum and pedagogy, and pre-requisites in areas of mathematics, statistics and the psychology of learning.

In their contribution from Norway, ‘Integrating assessment for learning in the teacher education programme at the University of Oslo’, Lisbeth Brevik, Marte Blikstad-Balas and Kirsti Engelien focus on a newly revised master’s level teacher education programme, in which AfL principles have been purposefully integrated. With almost 150 teacher candidates involved in the research, this case study described through lecture notes, student videos, and student exam papers aimed to examine how AfL was used in the service of teacher candidate learning. An important finding from the study was that teacher candidates appeared more concerned with assessing their students’ learning than assessing themselves and their own developing assessment capability. Accordingly, this study reminds us that teacher candidates are primarily focused on their students’ growth and development, and that as teacher educators, we need to create the conditions through which they begin to focus simultaneously on their own development. If teacher candidates and teachers can see value in using AfL to support their own learning, they are more likely to appreciate assessment as an effective pedagogical approach with their classroom students. Hence, learning to assess is just as much about teacher candidates’ use of assessment for professional learning as it is about classroom assessment.

Mary Hill and colleagues, in their paper ‘Assessment for equity: learning how to use evidence to scaffold learning and improve teaching’, examine evidence regarding the assessment learning of 27 pre-service teachers in New Zealand, who were following a new Master of Teaching programme designed to prepare participants to address persistent inequitable outcomes of designated student groups in the country. The assessment curriculum was integrated across all courses and in-school experiences as one of six ‘interconnected facets of practice for equity’. Drawing on questionnaire data, interpretive analyses of assignments and focus group interviews, the study found that the programme combined theory and practice to build the assessment understanding and competence needed to address equity issues. The authors argue that this successful outcome was facilitated by incorporating the assessment curriculum into each course and intertwining university and school experiences, supported by a consistent focus on addressing equity throughout. Building on previous teacher education literature, this study provides further empirical evidence for a comprehensive and cohesive approach to assessment education, where candidates explore assessment alongside other critical topics in a coherent view of teacher education programming. Such an approach requires collaboration amongst faculty members to map the terrain of teacher learning, and establish complementary learning opportunities that build teacher candidates’ competencies and confidence in assessment and teaching.

In another contribution from New Zealand, ‘A rubric to track the development of secondary pre-service and novice teachers’ summative assessment literacy’, Frances Edwards notes that in order to assess student learning dependably teachers need to be able to call on specialised assessment knowledge and skills, and that these develop over time through ongoing teacher learning and experience. The author presents the SALRubric, an instrument specially constructed to track the development of secondary science teachers’ summative assessment literacy. The rubric covers 10 dimensions across three categories drawn from the literature and context-specific empirical evidence: knowledge of assessment, understanding the context for assessment and recognising the impact of assessment. The paper goes on to describe an application of the rubric in New Zealand, during which an increasing level of sophistication in teachers’ summative assessment literacy was observed over 20 months, albeit in a ‘nuanced manner’ for individual teachers. Implications of the use of the rubric are discussed in terms of summative assessment literacy practice and development.

The recent introduction of new regional curricula into the country, with a concomitant requirement for teachers to assess their students with reference to them, sets the context for the research described in Lucie Mottier Lopez and Raphaël Pasquini’s contribution from Switzerland: ‘Professional Controversies between Teachers about their Summative Assessment Practices: A Tool for Building Assessment Capacity’. The authors overview two collaborative research projects carried out in French-speaking Switzerland, that observed controversies in action having to do with the identification of appropriate pass marks for self-developed tasks and tests, i.e. standard setting. One project involved primary teachers and was based on a form of social moderation, while secondary teachers participated in the second project that referenced a model of curriculum alignment. The findings supported the potentially constructive role of professional controversies in building teachers’ summative assessment capacity, and suggest the value of exploring alternative pedagogical approaches to assessment education. As such, we argue that future research should extend the repertoire of pedagogies for effective assessment education that enable teacher educators to more readily engage teacher candidates in new learning about assessment.

In their contribution from Australia, ‘Standards of practice to standards of evidence: developing assessment capable teachers’, Claire Wyatt-Smith, Colette Alexander, Deanne Fishburn and Paula McMahon describe a project that began in response to a national context of increasing emphasis on standards and accountability. The project had a three-part commitment at its core. The first was to undertake a comprehensive audit and analysis of all teacher education programmes in the state of Queensland. This audit established the approaches and practices universities relied on when preparing assessment capable pre-service teachers. The second was to take account of multiple perspectives and approaches in initial teacher education, to integrate data into how beginning teachers are prepared to source and use evidence for improving learning and teaching. The third was to develop new principles, policies and practices for reviewing and moderating teacher education programmes against professional standards. The paper proposes a move beyond the discourse of professional standards of practice towards a complementary discourse of standards of evidence. Through this work, we see the value of inter-agency collaboration and the role for standards-based education in ensuring consistency and possibilities for teacher preparation.

From the professional in-service context, Zita Lysaght and Michael O’Leary in the Republic of Ireland carried out an empirical study involving completion of a self-assessment questionnaire by 594 practising teachers drawn from 42 primary schools. The study confirmed the urgent need for high-quality professional development to build teachers’ assessment capability. However, fiscal considerations obviated any possibility of financial support for a national programme of in-service assessment development. In their paper, ‘Scaling Up, Writ Small: Using an Assessment for Learning Audit Instrument to Stimulate Site-Based Professional Development, One School at a Time’, the authors offer the results of their study, and describe a strategy of drilling down to one in-school approach (i.e. Design-Based Implementation Research) to reflect on the importance of site-based collaborative professional development between researchers, teachers and others, as a mechanism for addressing teachers’ needs in a manner that also supports other participants’ professional interests.

In a complementary way, the work of Kay Livingston and Carolyn Hutchinson in Scotland takes a long view of career development while recognising the importance of balancing teachers’ individual learning priorities with systemic professional learning supports. Their paper, ‘Developing teachers’ capacities in assessment to promote pupil learning through career-long professional learning’, provides us with a comprehensive description of how various levels of an education system can work to provide options for teacher-driven professional learning. The authors specifically explore how teachers understand assessment in relation to their students’ learning, the curriculum and their pedagogical choices, and how teachers’ capacity to use assessment to improve students’ learning can be developed through career-long professional learning (CLPL). Ultimately, Livingston and Hutchinson wrestle with a persistent challenge for in-school professional learning by considering how teachers’ learning can be implemented and sustained both locally and nationally.

Interestingly, across pre-service and in-service contexts of assessment education there are consistent findings that effectively support teacher assessment capability. First, learning to assess involves teachers driving their learning by selecting priorities that are meaningful to them, their career stage and their context of work. It also involves actively integrating and practising assessment principles within their own professional learning so that they become intimately familiar with assessment processes and how they operate to support learning. Second, learning to assess involves aligning learning goals with professional development criteria and monitoring teacher learning through evidence-based self-assessments and feedback from knowledgeable others. Lastly, learning to assess involves multiple stakeholders. Aligning priorities across stakeholders is a challenge but a clear necessary step in providing meaningful opportunities for teacher learning at university, school and system levels.

As we continue to promote assessment as a fundamental competency for teachers in the twenty-first century, the papers in this collection argue for additional empirical research in assessment education. Among the pressing topics for future research are the need to examine (a) models for universities to build meaningful learning partnerships with local schools, education bodies and accreditation agencies in the service teacher learning; (b) the design of coherent teacher education programmes that put assessment learning to work in relation to other fundamental teacher competencies and complex educational contexts; (c) diverse pedagogical approaches to engage teachers in learning about assessment; and (d) teacher candidates’ and teachers’ prioritisation and valuing of assessment within their own professional development. Within this era of increased educational accountability, there is clearly an urgent and global need to support teachers’ work and learning in assessment. The papers in this collection demonstrate the value and power of quality research and teacher education in addressing this need.

Christopher DeLuca
Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
Sandra Johnson
Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK