Showing What They Know: How Supervisors Express Their Assessment Literacy

Abstract

This study examines the assessment literacy of university-based student teaching supervisors in a teacher education program. The first author engaged in an inquiry community with three supervisors from the program. Using the four dimensions of the Approaches to Classroom Assessment Inventory (ACAI) framework, we sought to expose the specific phenomena of supervisors’ articulation of the ACAI dimensions of assessment literacy. We organized our findings around the dimensions: assessment process, assessment product, assessment fairness, and assessment theory. We found that supervisors expressed multiple dimensions of assessment within their inquiry community meeting discussions and interviews and expressed varied knowledge and prioritization of each dimension. We also found that supervisors did not discuss the dimensions of the ACAI in isolation, instead, they illustrated the complex interplay among assessment and other pedagogical constructs. These findings provide an initial contribution to the literature on supervisors’ assessment literacy, which could inform research and practice.