Volume 46, Issue 2 - Developing Assessment Literacy for Classroom-Based Formative Assessment Guest Editors: Peter Yongqi GU & Ricky LAM

Formative assessment (FA) has been increasingly recognised as a powerful tool to improve teaching and learning, and thereby increase educational effectiveness. As such, FA has been written into government directives and curriculum standards; and incorporated into teacher education programmes. At the classroom level, however, teachers have found FA a formidable task that is difficult to implement. This has been attributed to the teacher’s lack of assessment literacy, among other reasons. In this guest-editor introduction, we frame the special issue and its scope by highlighting the main issues involved. We then briefly introduce the 10 articles which we believe, taken together, advance our understanding of teacher formative assessment literacy and its development.

This article offers a perspective on two questions: (1) How will a better assessment future differ from the current assessment landscape? (2) What will assessment literacy look like in that future? Answers will be based on a recent large-scale review of research in the area of assessment to inform teaching and learning and professional development work with teachers. The article will focus on identifying what will change—and is changing—in assessment, what can be expected to stay the same, and how that affects assessment literacy needs for teachers, school leaders, and students.

Teacher assessment literacy has gained significant attention in recent years due to its critical role in learning and teaching. Various theoretical and empirical conceptualizations of this construct have been emerging with more recent emphasis on building teachers’ knowledge and skills. The aim is to make highly contextualized, fair, consistent and trustworthy assessment decisions to inform learning and teaching to effectively support both student and teacher learning. This article explores changes in secondary English language teachers’ assessment literacy following the introduction of school-based assessment for learning as part of high stakes secondary school assessment reform in Hong Kong. Drawing on teacher questionnaires completed by almost 4,500 teachers who undertook a common professional development course conducted over the first six years of assessment reform (2005 – 2011), this paper explores the impact of professional development on teachers’ assessment literacy. Despite Hong Kong’s deeply ingrained competitive examination-oriented culture, an analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data from pre- and post-program evaluations demonstrate signs of positive change in teacher attitudes, confidence and practices, in particular in using assessment criteria, designing and implementing appropriate assessment tasks, involving learners more actively in the assessment process, making trustworthy assessment decisions and providing effective feedback and feed-forward to students to improve student learning. The findings of the study suggest that changes in assessment culture are possible, provided teachers are well supported. The implications for assessment reform and for the development of teacher assessment literacy more generally are also discussed.

Formative assessment has become an increasingly popular topic in educational reform since the publication of Black and Wiliam’s (1998) highly influential review article. In China, formative assessment has been promoted by the Ministry of Education in its curriculum standards for over two decades. A lack of implementation in classrooms has been attributed to the lack of assessment literacy among classroom teachers. A 12-week professional development program was designed and implemented for a group of five secondary school EFL teachers in China aiming at developing their classroom-based formative assessment literacy. The program took the form of collaborative action research in which a researcher joined the teachers to form a community of practice for continuing professional development. This paper focuses on one teacher’s growth in assessment literacy for classroom-based formative assessment. Classroom video recordings and interviews were transcribed and coded using NVivo 12. Baseline data indicated that the teacher lacked the knowledge and beliefs needed to conduct formative assessment. She did not have clear targets for teaching, learning and assessment; and she did not make any targets clear to her students. In addition, the teacher’s assessment practices did not aim to improve student subject core competencies as stipulated in the senior secondary English language curriculum. By the end of the program, the teacher’s knowledge, beliefs and practices in formative assessment were significantly enhanced. In particular, her goal setting for classroom teaching, learning and assessment was intentionally aligned with the development of subject core competencies. More cycles of formative assessment practices were found to help students close the learning gaps and achieve their learning goals. These findings lend encouraging support to the feasibility of teachers developing formative assessment literacy within a continuing professional development framework.

While teachers’ language assessment literacy (LAL) development has been researched exponentially, little is known about the construction of teachers’ assessment identity in their LAL development. The current study attempts to fill this gap by exploring how two novice university English teachers constructed their assessment identity in the Chinese context. Data were collected over three semesters through narrative frames, interviews, and field observations. The data revealed that the two teachers experienced a shift from not identifying themselves to be an assessor to being an assessor, along with their LAL development. They constructed their assessment identity with different trajectories. Specifically, one informant proactively made sense of her identities as an unswerving assessment practitioner and an ardent assessment explorer but preferred to label herself as a guide and “a stumbling novice assessor.” The other developed his identities as a confident feedback giver and a lenient marker, preferably identifying himself as “a life mentor.” These idiosyncratic construction trajectories were mainly influenced by teachers’ conceptions of assessment, prior assessment experiences, personal dispositions (e.g., self-efficacy, agency, reflection) and institutional requirements. Findings of this study offer insights into the under-researched area of teacher professional identity in language assessment and provide implications on how to become effective language assessors.

While prior research suggests that teachers’ conceptions of assessment (CoA) are influenced by their personal characteristics, experiences, and specific sociocultural contexts, how these factors influence teachers’ CoA is still underexplored. This narrative study explores what teachers’ CoA are, as well as how influential factors mediate their CoA by drawing on data from narrative frames with 48 high school EFL teachers in China. Findings reveal that teachers commonly endorsed the improvement-oriented purpose of assessment. A range of factors is found to have exerted influences to different degrees on these conceptions, including personal factors (i.e., teachers’ agency in assessment), experiential factors [i.e., (anti-)apprenticeship of observation about assessment], and contextual factors (i.e., exam-oriented culture). These findings are discussed in terms of how teachers negotiate the improvement- and accountability-oriented purposes of assessment, as well as how teachers’ CoA are shaped by teacher agency, emotional experiences as assessees, and the exam-oriented culture. This paper concludes with implications for research on teachers’ CoA and policy, practice, and professional development of teacher assessment literacy.

Assessment feedback is an important aspect of teacher assessment literacy which can be understood along three interrelated dimensions: 　conceptual in terms of conceptions teachers have of feedback, praxeological regarding feedback practice, and socio-emotional which relates to how teachers attend to the emotional dynamics of assessment from the students’ perspective (Pastore & Andrade, 2019). This paper presents the findings of a phenomenographic study involving 15 teachers in Singapore schools that explored their qualitatively different ways of experiencing assessment feedback. Drawing on the variation theory perspective, the analysis of interview data resulted in five teachers’ conceptions of assessment feedback that shed light on the non-static nature of feedback engagement. These conceptions represent the variation in teachers’ qualitatively different ways of experiencing assessment feedback, and ranged from feedback as inspection of students (emphasizing mistakes) to feedback as introspection for students (emphasizing reflection on feedback). The findings show the potential that teachers can aspire to move from level to level, depending on contexts and students. Insights on the continuum of teacher assessment feedback literacy are drawn. Implications for developing teacher assessment literacy are discussed to assist teachers in reviewing their conceptions of assessment feedback beliefs and enhancing assessment feedback practices beyond improving academic learning.

There has been increasing debate about the effectiveness of peer feedback, especially the way learners actively engage with and act upon the feedback (Lam, 2017). Yet research has shown that well-managed peer feedback offers a host of social, cognitive and linguistic benefits (Sun & Doman, 2018). This paper looks at the perceptions of 24 teachers of English from Myanmar who experienced and evaluated a new way of organizing the peer feedback process known as Peer Review Circles (PRCs). In PRCs, learners work in groups of three, with two giving feedback on the work of the third, who listens, reflects on and only then responds to the comments. It was found that teachers perceived this arrangement to increase the quantity, variety and reliability of feedback, create a more conducive feedback atmosphere and aid the development of “soft/transferable” skills. Respondents identified teachers’ and learners’ lack of familiarity with this new approach, time constraints and the possibility of conflicting comments as potential difficulties of PRCs. To overcome these, respondents suggested providing training to teachers and learners, especially through modelling. This paper sheds light on a different way of managing peer feedback, PRCs, highlighting the benefits of working in triadic over dyadic groups and the value of oral observational peer feedback to develop students’ feedback literacy. The key implications relate to peer review training and the need to focus not just on procedural aspects but also on developing learners’ emotional competence to help sustain their language learning within today’s educational landscape.

For pre-service teacher education, it would be helpful to know how difficult certain aspects of language testing and assessment are for students. Such information could serve different pedagogical purposes including program design and lesson sequencing. This paper, situated in the context of pre-service teacher education at the University of Vienna, Austria, presents an approach to developing language assessment literacy (LAL) which takes account of the difficulty of language assessment. To obtain empirical difficulty estimates, the items of a LAL test for pre-service teachers of English were converted into statements of ability, knowledge, and understanding and then calibrated by means of multi-facet Rasch analysis based on performance data from 420 students. Qualitative content analysis was used to identify clusters among the calibrations, thus characterizing the difficulty continuum. The findings show a clear progression which can offer a basis for the design of teacher education programs. I first report on the process of generating the difficulty estimates. Then I describe the resulting difficulty continuum with particular emphasis on classroom-based assessment. Finally, I suggest design principles for difficulty-informed assessment courses, illustrating how they could be implemented in the teacher education program at the University of Vienna.

Assessment has had an enduring influence on teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The conceptualization and enactment of formative assessment as an integral foundation of learning-oriented assessment (LOA) has become the focus of recent studies, reflecting the mandated role of formative assessment in educational policies such as the national curriculum in China. However, it remains largely unexplored how junior high school EFL teachers in China understand and interpret formative assessment in response to policy imperatives and the enactment of learning-oriented assessment practices in classes that often focus on test preparation. To address the gap, this article reports a case study of three junior high school EFL teachers in a southwest city in China in order to explore their assessment beliefs and learning-oriented classroom assessment practices. The data collected included 15 audio-recorded classroom observations and three semi-structured audio-recorded interviews. The three teachers interpreted the concept of LOA in different ways and their classroom practices reflected these understandings. Despite working in a heavily exam-oriented context, the teachers were observed to provide contingent oral feedback to their learners, help learners develop their understanding through learner-centered tasks and interactions where learners were positioned as resources for each other through grouping and peer-assessment opportunities, and encourage learner autonomy. These findings point to ways in which LOA can be realized within exam-oriented English language learning contexts.