Abstract:

Tests and exams are an important part of the education system, and governments all over the world are interested in school results. Most of them push school leaders and schools to get better results, but what do the exams test? This study is trying to look into what assessments in teacher education tests.

In this study, we have looked at the formal assessment of students in Physical Education (PE) and Religious Education (RE). The assessments we investigated were applied in 2017 at one of the largest teacher education institutions in Norway. They were given to teacher students attending either Physical Education or Religious Education. Both courses gave 30 ECTS during the fourth (and last compulsory) year in the students’ teacher education. We chose to focus on the assessment in these fourth year courses, to enable comparison of assessments in the two different subjects in courses with otherwise comparable conditions. We looked at the totality of formal assessments in the courses – obligatory coursework (assessment for learning) and final exams (assessment of learning) – focusing on the tasks in the final exams.

To analyse the assessments we have looked at how the assessments were designed, how the challenges are established, what parts of the curriculum they tested, and how didactics were integrated in the exam. We looked for ”Subject matter content knowledge”, ”Pedagogical content knowledge” and ”Curricular knowledge” as Shulman (1986) points out is necessary for a good teacher. To analyse the material we have also looked at the different parts of the assessment in relation to Blooms taxonomy in the cognitive domain (Bloom 1956), using the revision made by Anderson and coworkers in 2001 (Anderson et. al 2001). Andersons change from noun to verb forms reflects a more active thinking, and the rearranging of the top categories established creating as the most difficult in the taxonomy would in our view be a better measurement in this study.

The result of the analysis show a broad fan of different ways of measuring competence in pedagogy and content knowledge. The assessments are creative in their challenges and the students have the opportunity to show their qualities by for instance creating. We find assessments that challenge the students to teach schoolchildren, having them reflect on content and pedagogy as well as tasks that ask for trivial, specific facts.

Keywords:

Assessment for learning, assessment of learning, teacher education.