This study is informed by the theoretical knowledge about formative assessment, teacher assessment literacy and teacher assessment conceptions, and it focuses on the conceptions and practices of assessment held by pre-service teachers and how the experience of the supervised practicum can influence it. An article with the study is currently under review by an international journal. In the next paragraphs we summarize and explain the main ideas of our framework and the purposes of the study.

It is well-known that assessment is one of the main strategies teachers use to facilitate learning, to certify student achievement, and to develop students' capacity to evaluate their future learning (Boud & Falchikov, 2006). Empirical studies in the area suggests that many novice and pre-service teachers do not have a wide knowledge about assessment, and they do not feel confident to do it effectively (Maclellan, 2004; Volante & Fazio, 2007).

For this reason, we wanted to analyze the influence of initial teaching education in the development of what researchers defined as assessment literacy (DeLuca et al., 2016), i.e., proposals for conceptualizing the essential theoretical knowledge about assessment and the consideration of factors that influence how teachers implement assessment. Specifically, we considered the influence of the supervised practicum, which we understand as the ‘teaching practice’ period when student teachers go to schools to implement theoretical learning about teaching. This is a decisive period because pre-service teachers have access to the teaching professional culture, via a set of experiences and knowledge inherent to the profession, including conceptions and assessment practices (Brito, 2020).

A few previous investigations have studied the impact of the practicum on conceptions of assessment. For instance, Xu and He (2019) and Prastikawati et al. (2022) reported an important change in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pre-service teachers due to the practicum, with an improvement in the knowledge about the assessment purposes (summative and formative).  However, there is still much room for improvement and a need to further analyze the effects of this period in assessment literacy, considering different educational stages, disciplines, and educational systems.

Therefore, the purpose of our study is to analyze the impact of a supervised practicum on the assessment conceptions and practices of pre-service Physical Education (PE) teachers. The assessment conceptions we used were defined according to Brown (2008): a) assessment improves teaching and learning; b) assessment makes students accountable for learning; c) assessment demonstrates the quality and accountability of schools and teachers; d) assessment should be rejected because it negatively affects teachers, students, curriculum, and teaching. We chose PE for our study due to its great pedagogical importance in Spain in the last decade in relation to assessment studies, especially focused on formative assessment (López-Pastor et al., 2020), and the fact that the other studies had focused in EFL.

The research design was a qualitative study based in interviewing and task analysis. 18 prospective teachers participated in the study. They were students in the master’s degree in Teacher Education for Secondary School, PE specialty, at a public university in Madrid during the academic year 2020-2021. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants before and after the internship. The interviews ranged from 25 to 35 minutes. At the end of the internship, participants carried out a written individual assignment in which they had to design the assessment of a teaching unit, that could be implemented during the practicum period. The participants were selected by purposeful sampling (Coolican, 2014). They did not get any reward from their participation in the study, although the assessment task was assessed and graded, and it had a weight of 10% in the participants’ Practicum final grade (all students had to perform this activity whether they participated in the study or not). Interview transcripts and written assignments were coded following a mixed coding process, using descriptive and analytic codes (Bazeley, 2013). Then, we performed a conceptual analysis using matrices. Data analysis was performed using Atlas.ti. To ensure the quality of the analytical process, we used a form of collaborative coding, in which the 1st and the 2nd author, from different disciplines, coded and discussed the data, while the 3rd author worked as an auditor in different stages, in order to improve the accountability of the data analysis (Akkerman et al., 2008).

Regarding the results, participants had very high expectations for the practicum period, but during this period their experiences with assessment was heterogeneous. Half of participants had a full experience assessing (design and implementation), while others only graded and there were even two participants that did not contribute substantially to assessment. Considering the general evolution of the participants during the process, a relevant result is that no participant improved or changed their discourse, conceptions, and practices towards a more formative view of assessment after the practicum. All the participants that emphasized the formative role of assessment at the end of the practicum had previously discussed or mentioned these ideas in the pre-practicum interview. Nevertheless, it is significant that there were two participants whose ideas on formative assessment were reduced after the practicum. About their assessment conceptions, participants held ideas connected with three kinds of assessment conceptions according to Brown’s proposal (2008) –improvement, school and student-accountability– and no participant mentioned ideas associated to the irrelevance category. Concerning their task, the assessment tools that were widely used were rubrics and checklists. They did not frequently used shared assessment strategies (self- and peer-assessment…) and our analysis of the rubrics found that they did not exploit their formative potential. One of the main conclusions of the study is that assessment is a key aspect for pre-service teachers and the practicum provides them with a great opportunity to see how it works in real settings, but they recognized it is one of the most complex elements of teaching (Hortigüela Alcalá et al., 2021). Participants acknowledged their experience is still limited and their approach to formative assessment was mainly theoretical, so in many cases they did not yet feel confident to implement it (DeLuca et al., 2019). We analyze the implications of these results and propose some recommendations for teacher education.

Akkerman, S., Admiraal, W., Brekelmans, M., & Oost, H. (2008). Auditing Quality of Research in Social Sciences. Quality & Quantity, 42(2), 257–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11135-006-9044-4 Bazeley, P. (2013). Qualitative data analysis. Practical strategies. Sage. Boud, D., & Falchikov, N. (2006). Aligning assessment with long-term learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(4), 399–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930600679050 Brito, A. E. (2020). Formação inicial de professores e o estágio supervisionado: experiência formadora? Revista Praxis Educacional, 16(43), 158-174. https://doi.org/10.22481/rpe.v16i43.7666 Brown, G. T. L. (2008). Conceptions of assessment. Understanding that assessment means to teachers and students. Nova Science Publishers. Coolican, Hugh. (2014). Research methods and statistics in psychology (6th ed.). Psychology Press. DeLuca, C., Coombs, A., MacGregor, S., & Rasooli, A. (2019). Toward a Differential and Situated View of Assessment Literacy: Studying Teachers’ Responses to Classroom Assessment Scenarios. Frontiers in Education, 4, 94. https://doi.org/10.3389/FEDUC.2019.00094/BIBTEX DeLuca, C., LaPointe-McEwan, D., & Luhanga, U. (2016). Teacher assessment literacy: a review of international standards and measures. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 28(3), 251–272. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11092-015-9233-6/TABLES/6 Hortigüela Alcalá, D., González-Villora, S., & Hernando-Garijo, A. (2021). Do we really assess learning in physical education? Teachers’ perceptions at different educational stages. Retos, 42, 643-654. Maclellan, E. (2004). Initial knowledge states about assessment: novice teachers’ conceptualisations. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(5), 523–535. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.TATE.2004.04.008 Prastikawati, E. F., Mujiyanto, J., Saleh, M., & WuliFitriati, S. (2022). Pre-service EFL teachers' conceptions of assessment during their teaching practicum. KnE Social Sciences, 7(19), 615-626. https://doi.org/10.18502/kss.v7i19.12480 Volante, L., & Fazio, X. (2007). Exploring Teacher Candidates’ Assessment Literacy: Implications for Teacher Education Reform and Professional Development. Canadian Journal of Education, 30(3), 749–770. Xu, Y., & He, L. (2019). How pre-service teachers' conceptions of assessment change over practicum: Implications for teacher assessment literacy. Frontiers in Education, 4, Article 145. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2019.00145