Claire Wyatt-Smith – författare

This book provides a significant contribution to conversations about teacher quality and graduate readiness for teaching. It presents empirical insights into how a multidisciplinary team of researchers, teacher educators, and policy personnel mobilized for collective change in a standards-driven reform initiative. The insights are research-informed and critically relevant for anyone interested in teacher preparation and credentialing. It gives an account of a bold move to install a collaborative culture of evidence-informed inquiry to professionalize teacher education.

The centerpiece of the book is the use of standards and evidence to show the quality of graduates entering the teaching workforce. The book presents, for the first time, a model of online cross-institutional moderation as benchmarking to generate large-scale evidence of the quality of teacher education. The book also introduces a new conceptualization of a feedback loop using summative data for accountability and formative data to inform curriculum review and program renewal.

This book offers the insider story of the conceptualization, design, and implementation of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA). It involves going to scale with a large group of Australian universities, government agencies, and schools, and using participatory approaches to advance new thinking about evidence-informed inquiry, cross-institutional moderation, and innovative digital infrastructure.

The discussion of competence assessment, standards, and change processes presented in the book has relevance beyond teacher education to other professions.

This book provides a significant contribution to conversations about teacher quality and graduate readiness for teaching. It presents empirical insights into how a multidisciplinary team of researchers, teacher educators, and policy personnel mobilized for collective change in a standards-driven reform initiative. The insights are research-informed and critically relevant for anyone interested in teacher preparation and credentialing. It gives an account of a bold move to install a collaborative culture of evidence-informed inquiry to professionalize teacher education.

The centerpiece of the book is the use of standards and evidence to show the quality of graduates entering the teaching workforce. The book presents, for the first time, a model of online cross-institutional moderation as benchmarking to generate large-scale evidence of the quality of teacher education. The book also introduces a new conceptualization of a feedback loop using summative data for accountability and formative data to inform curriculum review and program renewal.

This book offers the insider story of the conceptualization, design, and implementation of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA). It involves going to scale with a large group of Australian universities, government agencies, and schools, and using participatory approaches to advance new thinking about evidence-informed inquiry, cross-institutional moderation, and innovative digital infrastructure.

The discussion of competence assessment, standards, and change processes presented in the book has relevance beyond teacher education to other professions.

This book makes assessment processes transparent for practitioners, and shows how assessment should align with curriculum and teaching for success in education. The book will show you how practitioner use of achievement standards can improve learning, equity, social justice and accountability.

Inside this book, you will learn about:

Assessment for Education is the perfect guide for students, researchers, academics and teaches, and anyone working in curriculum and assessment policy.

This book brings together internationally recognised scholars with an interest in how to use the power of assessment to improve student learning and to engage with accountability priorities at both national and global levels. It includes distinguished writers who have worked together for some two decades to shift the assessment paradigm from a dominant focus on assessment as measurement towards assessment as central to efforts to improve learning. These writers have worked with the teaching profession and, in so doing, have researched and generated key insights into different ways of understanding assessment and its relationship to learning.

The volume contributes to the theorising of assessment in contexts characterised by heightened accountability requirements and constant change. The book’s structure and content reflect already significant and growing international interest in assessment as contextualised practice, as well as theories of learning and teaching that underpinand drive particular assessment approaches. Learning theories and practices, assessment literacies, teachers’ responsibilities in assessment, the role of leadership, and assessment futures are the organisers within the book’s structure and content.

The contributors to this book have in common the view that quality assessment, and quality learning and teaching are integrally related. Another shared view is that the alignment of assessment with curriculum, teaching and learning is linchpin to efforts to improve both learning opportunities and outcomes for all. Essentially, the book presents new perspectives on the enabling power of assessment. In so doing, the writers recognise that validity and reliability - the traditional canons of assessment – remain foundational and therefore necessary. However, they are not of themselves sufficient for quality education. The book argues that assessment needs to be radically reconsidered in the context of unprecedented societal change. Increasingly, communities are segregating more by wealth, with clear signs of social, political, economic and environmental instability. These changes raise important issues relating to ethics and equity, taken to be core dimensions in enabling the power of assessment to contribute to quality learning for all. This book offers readers new knowledge about how assessment can be used to re/engage learners across all phases of education.

This book explores how well teachers are prepared for professional practice. It is an outcome of a large-scale research and development program that has collected extensive data on the impact of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment on Initial Teacher Education programs and preservice teachers’ engagement with the assessment. It contributes to international debates in teacher education by examining an Australian experience of teacher performance assessments as a catalyst for cultural change and practice reform in teacher education. 

The respective chapters describe and critique this unique, multi-institutional investigation into the quality of teacher education and present substantial evidence, drawing on a variety of conceptual, empirical and methodological entry points. Further, they address the intellectual, experiential and personal resources and related expertise that teacher educators and preservice teachers bring to their practice. Taken together, they offerreaders clearly conceptualised and evidence-rich accounts of site-specific and cross-site investigations into cultural, pedagogical and assessment change in Initial Teacher Education.