Enhancing meaningful learning is an important aim in geography education. Also, assessment should reflect this aim. Both formative and summative assessments contribute to meaningful learning when more complex knowledge and cognitive processes are assessed. The internal school-based geography examinations of the final exam in pre-vocational secondary education in the Netherlands are an important test case to reveal the extent to which geography teachers construct examinations containing complex knowledge and cognitive processes. In this study, internal school-based examinations were analyzed based on a taxonomy table derived from a revision of Bloom's taxonomy and discussed with teachers and experts. The results of the content analysis showed that more than half of the test items in the internal schoolbased examinations are based on remembering knowledge, especially factual and conceptual geographical knowledge.

No abstract

Teachers’ classroom assessment practices tend to encourage rote learning instead of meaningful learning. To enhance teachers’ classroom assessment practices, teacher involvement in assessment construction appears necessary. To foster teacher professional growth in relation to this issue, a professional development programme on summative assessment and meaningful learning in pre-vocational geography education in the Netherlands was designed. In 2016, a prototype of the programme was tested and evaluated in a small-scale case study. The results suggest that the programme was feasible and practical and contributed to change in teachers’ knowledge, skills and practices.