Teacher Assessment Literacy

Teacher assessment literacy is an emerging issue in education, as teachers are playing an increasingly central role in classroom assessment and in preparation for, or administration of, qualifications or accountability testing. In classroom assessment, teachers not only need to design and implement assessment tasks, but also need to interpret and communicate assessment results to their administrators, colleagues, students, and parents. This series of tasks requires teachers to make important yet complex professional decisions about assessment appropriate to their dynamic, situated contexts. To successfully do so, they need to draw on their prior experiences and training/development to enact their assessment literacy in accordance with other contextual mediating factors. Failure in enacted assessment literacy may lead to poor quality assessment design, implementation, interpretation and communication. Despite the paramount importance of teacher assessment literacy in predicting the quality of classroom assessment practices, how assessment literacy is enacted in practice remains relatively under-explored. In particular, it is unclear how teacher assessment literacy constitutes and is constituted by various mediating factors (i.e., theoretical knowledge of assessment, conceptions of assessment, institutional contexts, socio-cultural contexts, teachers’ own learning and identity construction, etc.). Taken together, empirical studies on how teacher assessment literacy is enacted in practice are still limited, and teacher assessment literacy as a complex system requires an integrated understanding of how assessment literacy relates to other relatively fixed factors across contexts.

The aim of the Research Topic is therefore to further our understanding of how teacher assessment literacy is enacted in practice, and how it dynamically interacts with various mediating factors. It aims to gain a deeper understanding of how teacher conceptions of assessment plays a part in shaping assessment literacy, how institutional contexts inhibit or facilitate teacher assessment literacy in practice, as well as how teachers’ professional learning influences the dynamics of their assessment literacy enactment.

For this Research Topic, although empirical research on teacher assessment literacy is preferred, conceptual and review papers will also be considered. We encourage research from a wide range of contexts, perspectives and methodological approaches to bring in more possibilities for research on teacher assessment literacy. It may well be that a deeper theoretical understanding of assessment literacy in practice will arise from descriptions of complex processes in multiple contrasting contexts. We are interested in manuscripts that may further our understanding of how the complexity of dynamics of teacher assessment literacy develops vertically and horizontally, and how such development influences the effectiveness of classroom assessment and maximization of student learning outcomes.