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 the knowledge that the university expects university-appointed tutors and school-based supervising teachers to have in order to make fair judgements about a student’s teaching competence. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the TP assessment instruments used during 2012 by five South African universities offering initial teacher education. It describes the grounds upon which the comparative analysis was done, and offers a qualitative analysis of the knowledge base that the assessors of student teaching are assumed to have. We find that the structure and criteria of some TP assessment instruments tend to construct the assessment of student teaching as straight-forward exercise in verifying that certain technical requirements are met. In contrast, we show how others use structure and criteria potentially to enable a more professionally based judgement of the competence of student teaching.