Section archive - Assessment & Evaluation

The authors discuss the inadequacy of current assessment practices to measure teacher candidates’ competence to teach diverse students. The authors present two new scales to measure teachers’ competence to teach diverse populations. The Teachers’ Sense of Inclusion Efficacy Scale (I– TSES), and the Teachers’ Sense of Diversity Efficacy Scale (D–TSES). These two efficacy instruments based on the highly reliable and valid Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES). The authors argue that teacher education programs that integrate all three scales—TSES, I–TSES, and D–TSES—into their systematic program assessment would be able to more comprehensively address candidates’ diversity competence.

By using elements from cultural studies of cartography as well as sociology and the philosophy of science, this article claims that the analogy of cartography and evaluation can open novel vistas for contemplating the relationship between the world of education and its scientific representation. The analysis shows how evaluation as the mapping of the reality of education brings distant objects near, onto a homogeneous, stable plane.

The study examines differences between preservice and inservice teachers’ knowledge of, perceived skills in, and attitudes toward educational measurement. The participants were preservice and inservice teachers teaching grades 5 to 10 in Oman. Results showed that inservice teachers demonstrated a lower level of knowledge, a higher level of perceived skilfulness, and a more favourable attitude toward educational measurement than preservice teachers.

The author uses the Assessment Practices Framework to study a high school Chemistry teacher as she designed, implemented, and learned from a chemistry lab report. The author reports the teacher’s assessment practices and the alignment in her assessment practices through the three vertices of the assessment triangle (cognition, observation, and interpretation).