The power of assessment in teacher education

Abstract

This chapter addresses three main assessment challenges faced in innovative assessment practices and aims to encourage teacher educators to take up these challenges

in their assessment practices. The first challenge is to establish a shift from de-contextualised tests to more authentic assessments. This requires the development of assessments that observe student teachers’ performance in situations that resemble the current and future teaching practice as much as possible. A second challenge is to increase student teachers’ involvement in assessment by handing over the responsibilities of assessor from teacher educator to student teacher. After all, one of the main responsibilities of teachers is to assess their pupils

in schools. For teacher educators, this means that they need to equip student teachers with assessor skills, like developing appropriate assessment criteria and giving

adequate feedback on student performance. Because assessment is a delicate issue and many important educational decisions

are based on assessment outcomes, it is important to assure the quality of assessment. A third challenge is, therefore, that teacher educators critically evaluate the

quality of their own assessments and equip student teachers with the skills to do so in their own future practice as well. This chapter addresses these three challenges and offers practical guidelines for dealing with them in daily assessment practices.