Inhaltszusammenfassung

Competence in assessment has been identified as a key feature in teachers’ professional success. However, assessment competence is a complex field, comprising capacity in both summative and formative assessment. Hence, a detailed view on how student teachers perceive assessment is the focus of this study. Based on an official catalogue of assessment standards, over 900 student teachers repeatedly rated the importance of the standards and the frequency with which they behaved in accordance w... Competence in assessment has been identified as a key feature in teachers’ professional success. However, assessment competence is a complex field, comprising capacity in both summative and formative assessment. Hence, a detailed view on how student teachers perceive assessment is the focus of this study. Based on an official catalogue of assessment standards, over 900 student teachers repeatedly rated the importance of the standards and the frequency with which they behaved in accordance with the standards in practicum situations. Analyses revealed that (a) students perceived assessment competence as a contextual entity distinguishable from other domains, (b) while they assigned high importance ratings to assessment standards in general, standards concerned specifically with external evaluation were seen as relatively unimportant, and (c) they perceived a rise in their own assessment competence during their teacher education. Taken together, this suggests that in the student view assessment competence is important and develops over time. Notes 1. In the Federal Republic of Germany, there are 16 Länder (federal states). 2. Note that the KMK’s definitions of competence domains (i.e. the specific set of standards subsumed under each of the four domains) are referred to as ‘Teaching’, ‘Assessment’ etc. In contrast, content areas will be addressed as teaching competence, assessment competence, etc., when not related specifically to the KMK domains. 3. Of note, Black (Citation2015) states that this principle has not been seen as an inherent feature of educational assessment, but rather as in opposition to the aims of summative assessment. Hence, formative assessment, or AFL, is introduced as a means to widen the concept of educational assessment itself. 4. In KOSTA we did not ask student teachers about the quality of the application of competence-relevant behaviour, but merely about the frequency. Teacher candidates at this relatively early stage of their teacher education (i.e. the first practicums) cannot realistically be expected to (already) behave or perform in a successful way (quality aspect). It may, however, be expected that they are aware of the standards for professional teaching behaviour (as expressed in the items) and that they attempt to behave in these ways. At this early stage thus, the frequency of attempt itself is seen as an indicator for competence. 5. The Big Five model of five stable personality traits covers personality features beyond intellectual ability, viz. ‘Neuroticism’ (or, reversely, ‘Emotional Stability’), ‘Extraversion’, ‘Conscientiousness’, ‘Openness to Experience’, and ‘Agreeableness’ (e.g. McCrae & John, Citation1992). In the KOSTA project, only the first three of these traits, found to have an impact on success in the teaching profession in earlier studies, were assessed by means of the ‘Teacher Personality Adjectives Scale’ (Brandstätter & Mayr, Citation1994). 6. As study regulations varied amongst different teacher education programmes and over time, there was some variation in the duration of the practicums. 7. Whereas latent variable modelling in three of the four domains was feasible on the basis of the sets of items serving as manifest indicators (each item pertaining to the KMK’s normatively proposed eleven competence descriptions, see Table 1), the modelling strategy failed for the ‘Assessment’ domain. To overcome this serious shortcoming, items in the ‘Assessment’ domain were later submitted to empirical re-analysis of KOSTA II data with the aim of identifying indicator variables adequate for latent variable modelling. Results from this pre-analysis are reported as a preliminary study below. 8. Given that assessment and feedback in an educational context go hand in hand, there is good reason to understand counselling competence as one aspect of a broader assessment competence (as is done in the KMK’s ‘Assessment’ standards). Therefore, some items on counselling were included in KOSTA. On the other hand, empirical evidence suggests that counselling and assessment competence are only loosely correlated in the .20 range (Klug, Bruder, Keller, & Schmitz, Citation2012). Assuming both aspects to be indicative of a common construct in numerical analysis may thus be a misspecification. 9. In the ‘Teaching’, ‘Education’ and ‘Innovation’ domains, indicators were calculated as scale means of all items pertaining to the respective competences as proposed by the KMK (Citation2004/2014), e.g. the KMK competences 1–3 as displayed in Table 1 formed the indicators underlying the latent ‘Teaching’ competence variable. In the ‘Assessment’ domain, the three indicators generated in the preliminary exploratory factor analysis were used. 10. RMSEA = Root Mean Square Error of Approximation, TLI = Tucker-Lewis Index, CFI = Comparative Fit Index, sRMR = Standardised Root Mean Square Residual, AIC = Akaike Information Criterion; for more information on these indices and their interpretation see for example Hu and Bentler (Citation1999) or Schermelleh-Engel, Moosbrugger, and Müller (Citation2003). 11. Unstandardized estimate; the value reported refers to the original item metrics (six-point scale). 12. These were the facets of assessment competence identified in the preliminary structural analysis – see methods section. 13. While research orientation is not addressed in catalogues of assessment competence in an international context (cf. DeLuca et al., Citation2016), it is explicitly included in the KMK (Citation2004/2014) standards (see Table 2).» weiterlesen» einklappen

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Klassifikation

DFG Fachgebiet:
1.21-04 - Erziehungswissenschaftliche Sozialisations- und Professionalitätsforschung

DDC Sachgruppe:
Allgemeines, Wissenschaft