From sea to sea: The Canadian landscape of assessment education

ABSTRACT

Background

The presence and function of assessment in Canadian classrooms has changed in the past thirty years. Driving this continuously evolving landscape of classroom assessment is the fundamental belief that classroom assessment can be effectively used to monitor and support student learning and achievement. A central challenge amid this changing landscape is that teachers are required to keep pace with increasing assessment expectations, with research continuing to show that teachers are generally underprepared for the current context of assessment they may face. A potential root cause of this reported unpreparedness relates to teacher preparation in assessment during initial teacher education programmes.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to examine approaches to assessment education across Canadian teacher education programmes. Drawing on data from teacher educators and teacher education documents (e.g. course syllabi), two research questions guided this study:

1. What are the programmatic provisions for assessment education across Canadian teacher education programmes?

2. What are teacher educators’ approaches to assessment education?

Method

This study explores the landscape of assessment education across Canada through analyses of interviews with teacher educators (n = 25) and programme documentation drawn from 12 teacher education programmes.

Findings

The analyses identified six overarching themes that characterise contemporary assessment education: (1) similar structures of assessment education; (2) limited time for assessment education; (3) inconsistent messaging; (4) focus of learning; (5) attitudes and explicitly modelling assessment; and (6) building explicit connections to teaching contexts across kindergarten – 12^th grade (student ages 5–18).

Conclusions

Understanding how teachers are educated in assessment is the first step in redressing teachers’ low levels of assessment literacy. This exploratory pan-Canadian study provides a theoretical and descriptive foundation for future research into assessment education in Canada and elsewhere, with the aim of improving teacher education in assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment literacy
• assessment education
• teacher education
• teacher learning
• formative and summative assessment
• classroom assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Course’ in the Canadian context is used to describe a discrete unit of study, usually with a single instructor. Courses can last a full year, full term, half-term, or an even smaller length of time and contribute to the requirements for graduation from a teacher education programme.