Knowledge and judgement for assessing student teaching: a cross-institutional analysis of teaching practicum assessment instruments

Abstract

Teaching practicum (TP) assessment instruments provide insight into the nature of theknowledge that the university expects university-appointed tutors and school-basedsupervising teachers to have in order to make fair judgements about a student’s teachingcompetence. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the TP assessment instrumentsused during 2012 by five South African universities offering initial teacher education. Itdescribes the grounds upon which the comparative analysis was done, and offers aqualitative analysis of the knowledge base that the assessors of student teaching areassumed to have. We find that the structure and criteria of some TP assessment instrumentstend to construct the assessment of student teaching as straight-forward exercise inverifying that certain technical requirements are met. In contrast, we show how others usestructure and criteria potentially to enable a more professionally based judgement of thecompetence of student teaching.