Given the focus on developing an alternative approach toward improving the quality of teacher education and training in South Africa, teacher educators and curriculum developers face increasing responsibility to implement competence-based assessment in initial teacher education and training. This exploratory examination of the scaffolding assessment of foundational, practical, and reflexive competences conducted through a case study intended to gather data on the experiences, views, and performance of a sample of 42 students in the third-year level of a teacher qualification program. The analytic rubrics with performance descriptors and the rating scale of outstanding, excellent, good, satisfactory, and weak were instruments for gathering quantitative data. The second source of data was face-to-face verbal comments and the diagnostic evaluation conducted by the participants in a focus group on their performance under the codes feedback, feed forward, and feed up in the templates. The analysis of quantitative data presented in the pie chart highlighted different levels of proficiency achieved by participants in foundational, practical, and reflexive competences. The data summarized in the bar chart point to the improvement attained by participants in the focus group. Findings proved that scaffolding assessment into phases allows learners to: regulate their attainment of higher levels of proficiency; work independently; and develop a piece of comprehensive and integrated knowledge, set of skills, and abilities. This study revealed that competence-based assessment is perceived by students to be both an accurate way of gauging their performance and a vital part of the learning process itself.
Using activity theory as a lens to analyse interaction in a university–school initial teacher education and training partnership
