Swedish and Finnish Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions of Summative Assessment Practices

Summative assessments are an exercise of authority and something that pupils cannot easily appeal. The importance of teachers being able to assess their pupils correctly is consequently both a question of national equivalence and individual fairness. Therefore, summative assessment is a paramount theme in teacher education, and we aimed to investigate the perceptions and competence of student teachers regarding common summative assessment practices. The study was conducted at three universities, two in Sweden and one in Finland involving prospective language teachers responding to an online survey (N = 131). In addition, interviews were carried out with 20 Swedish and 6 Finnish student teachers. The analysis of the data indicates that student teachers value practices that enhance communication and collaboration as well as the curricular alignment of summative assessments. With respect to perceived competence, the respondents in general felt most confident with deploying traditional forms of summative assessment, while they were more uncertain about process evaluation and oral skills. Regarding significant differences in the participants’ perceptions of competence among the three universities, Finnish university students reported higher levels in all variables. However, room for improvement was found at all universities involved.

Conceptually expanding the curricular alignment model to understand the coherence of the graded summative assessment practices of teachers: issues and perspectives

Curricular alignment refers to the links of coherence, found in any teaching-learning process, between curriculum objectives, learning tasks and assessment approaches. This model makes it possible to understand the coherence of any assessment approach. By mobilizing data from a collaborative study carried out on eight secondary school teachers of mathematics and French, we will show, however, that its meaning is rather limited when it comes to understanding coherence in graded summative assessment practices and that, consequently, the model needs to be expanded conceptually. To this end, we will draw on an example of a summative test modelled in this way. Our findings demonstrate the relevance of analyzing summative assessment practices with the help of the expanded model, while considering the role that context plays in certain of its aspects.

Exploring processes of teaching and learning in African university contexts

This review examines recent literature about processes of teaching and learning in African higher education, focusing specifically on studies of teaching ‘for critical thinking’ in Kenya, Ghana, and Botswana. The review findings suggest that practices supporting critical thinking in African universities share a number of similarities to those highlighted in the literature published elsewhere in the world. For example, reviewed studies highlight the importance of curricular alignment, academic development, and varied assessment formats, while also acknowledging important limitations related to infrastructure, workload, and faculty and student attitudes. However, the review also exposes a crucial theoretical gap in the existing literature: the continued reliance on theories of teaching and learning that were initially developed based on studies of Western university contexts. As both teaching and learning are cultural processes, this limitation may be preventing this emerging body of literature from fully supporting universities to develop new ways of teaching that may best benefit their student populations.

Aligning Curriculum, Instruction, and Classroom Assessment in a University English Language Program

Curriculum, instruction, and classroom assessments should all be aligned with each other in order to promote student learning. By achieving alignment, classroom assessments become integrated into the curriculum and guide what and how teachers teach and what and how students learn. This chapter describes the case of how one university English language program improved curricular alignment through the use of teacher alignment forms for student learning outcomes (SLOs), level meetings, the use of test specifications, a peer review process for test development, an assessment handbook, and assessment workshops for teachers. These practices ensure explicit and documented alignment among their curriculum, instruction, and assessments.

An Ongoing Journey to Foster Urban Students' Online “Public Voices”

Digital participatory media offer urban social studies teachers a unique opportunity to foster students' civic skills and public voice while enhancing their understanding of social justice within a democratic society. This article addresses the continuation of a New York City 8th grade U.S. history teacher's journey to use digital tools to foster his students' collaborative and communication skills and to help them learn social justice oriented content. While doing so, he overcame challenges related to technology integration, curricular alignment, selection of appropriate digital tools, and the need to cultivate his students' online academic norms. In doing so, he confronted Livingston's query about whether the use of technology necessitates a “fundamental transformation in learning infrastructure” and the need “to rethink the relations between pedagogy and society, teacher and pupil, and knowledge and participation” (2012, p. 8). He ended this part of his journey with these new challenges: how to enable his students to become navigators of their learning; ways to align the curriculum with his students' thinking; and, managing a dynamic instructional support system guided by his students' learning. His goal is “to forge a bridge between [his students'] media production and civic engagement' (Kahne, Lee, & Feezell, 2012).