Boosting assessment literacy through teacher involvement

Abstract

In May 2015 I attended the European Association for Language Testing and Assessment (EALTA) Conference at the University of Copenhagen. The opening plenary session was delivered by Ofra Inbar-Lourie, a lecturer at the School of Education, Tel-Aviv University. She chose to examine how the act of enhancing teachers’ assessment literacy could bridge assessment policies and implementation practices. The implementation of assessment policies is bound to fail if no consideration is given to teacher agency, the role of teachers in the assessment process, teacher beliefs about assessment, and how teachers could collaborate together to form learning communities. A large part of the success of assessment policies rests upon assessment literate teachers. Trusting and empowering teachers to use assessment appropriately rather than expecting them to follow the precepts imposed by external experts is a means of facilitating effective teaching and learning. Teachers need to feel they own the process. The best way of achieving this is by equipping teachers with the necessary assessment literacy through their active involvement in assessment. In this article, I illustrate how such involvement might be enacted.