Sitting beside students’ learning from the beginning: development of assessment knowledge, skills and dispositions in initial teacher training

Sitting beside students’ learning from the beginning: development of assessment knowledge, skills and dispositions in initial teacher training

Author: E. de Padua
MPhil in Education - Educational Leadership and School Improvement route
Faculty of Education
University of Cambridge

Submission date: December 3rd 2010
Supervisor: Carole Waugh
Word count: 6376 words

I hereby declarethat the sources of which I have availed myself have been stated in the body of the essay and in the references section and the rest of the work is my own. This essay does not exceed 6,000 – 6,500 words in length.
Introduction
 

Until the year 1935, the word 'assessment' was used exclusively in the context of taxes, referring to the action of determining the amount of money that people needed topay; after that year this word was used in different contexts. But this word has an older root; it derives from the Latin expression ‘ad sedere’, which means 'to sit beside' (Swaffield, 2009; Wiggins, 1993). Specifically, this expression referred to the function of a judgement assistant who sat beside the judge during the judgement to help him to make a fair decision1.

Nowadays, the word‘assessment’ is a common concept in education and it is widely understood as the estimation of students’ learning for whatever purpose. What is the nature of this action? Is it about determining the ‘amount’ of knowledge and ability (as it was used in the taxes context)? Or is it about providing guidance and feedback to students, as did the assistant to the judge? If we agree with this latter view, wecould say that when teachers assess students’ learning, they act as an assistant who provides the support and information for students to know where they are, where they are going and what they have do to continue their progress.

Much research has been undertaken on the importance of assessment as a tool for improvement, yet these advances in research and theorisation do not seem to be reflectedin teachers’ classroom practices. This gap between research and practice exists in all levels of teacher professional development, from experienced teachers to recently graduated teachers (Baird, 2010). Governments in different countries (e.g. England, Scotland, United States, New Zealand, Australia) have tried to address the research/practice gap by financing programs for in-service assessmenttraining. The costs of these programs are enormous and a significant amount of the training time is dedicated to changing some beliefs that teachers have about assessment (Gardner et al., 2010; Winterbottom et al. 2008). As an outside viewer, a valid question could be: why not try to address this gap from the beginning, when new teachers are being trained? It is clear that teachers need to belearning permanently, but if we think of assessment as a fundamental part of teaching, widely affected by beliefs, it seems to be obvious that assessment has to be a main focus during initial teacher training (ITT). The purpose of this essay is to delineate general guidelines that could help to define some considerations for assessment skills development in ITT.

Assessment training in ITT is not aneasy task for central governments given that most universities and other institutions in charge of teacher training are autonomous (Committee on the Study of Teacher Preparation Programs in the United States and National Research Council, 2010). This fact hinders the effect of centralised initiatives about assessment practices. In that scenario, some countries have decided to implement standardsfor new teachers as a way to influence how teachers are trained in different aspects, assessment being among them. However, just to declare in standards what teachers have to know and be able to do does not solve the problem of how to effectively develop competencies in new teachers. To define explicit guidelines on how to train new teachers in assessment could implicate the reduction of the...