Assessing assessment literacy: An item response modeling approach for teacher educators

Summary

The study articulates how to meaningfully and consistently distinguish between levels of classroom assessment knowledge among pre-service teachers using a learning progressions framework. Guided by nationally recognized principles of development and acquisition of assessment literacy, the Classroom Assessment Literacy (CAL) instrument used to identify qualitative and quantitative differences in beginning classroom assessors’ proficiency estimates on a scale yields insight into new directions for modeling teacher learning progressions in this complex domain. Preliminary findings are relevant to assessment educators who are interested in diagnostic and formative uses of the CAL scales for evaluating pre-service teacher growth.