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The Constellation of Assessment Capacity Discourses

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Learning to Assess

Abstract

Over the past three decades, policy and professional standards have repeatedly called for teachers to integrate assessment continuously across their practice in various ways to identify, monitor, support, evaluate, and report on student learning. Educational researchers have conceptualised and operationalised multiple constructs to understand teachers’ classroom assessment practice, including assessment competency, assessment literacy, and later, assessment capability and assessment identity. The result of these multiple constructs presents a constellation of assessment discourses, which have influenced contemporary educational policies and professional development practices across systems, shaping understandings of teachers’ assessment work. This chapter critically maps the constellation of assessment capacity discourses through a scoping review methodology to examine how these related discourses have been conceptualised for preservice or in-service teachers. Across the chapter, the evolution of each construct is analysed over time (i.e., since the introduction of the construct into peer-reviewed literature) and space (i.e., geography), and in consideration for how the constructs contribute towards a current view of teachers’ assessment work today.

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DeLuca, C., Willis, J., Cowie, B., Harrison, C., Coombs, A. (2023). The Constellation of Assessment Capacity Discourses. In: Learning to Assess. Teacher Education, Learning Innovation and Accountability. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6199-3_3

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