In two previous studies (Hegender, 2010a, 2010b) the assessment of Swedish student teachers’ knowledge within student-teaching conferences during school-based teacher education (SBTE) was examined. The results showed that teacher educators and mentors almost exclusively assess student teachers’ experience-based and procedural knowledge. This confirms previous european research results (e.g. Edwards & Protheroe, 2004; Ottesen, 2007). Furthermore, any detailed and clear justifications of the assessed teacher knowledge were seldom explicitly verbally expressed by the assessors (i.e. teacher educators and students’ mentors). The results also showed that the assessments mainly were explicitly formative rather than summative, which also confirm other studies (cf. Goodwin & Oyler, 2008). One conclusion of the results is that the SBTE would benefit from a straighten assessment strategy. Such a straighten strategy is the research aim to develop in a design experiment (DE) at two Swedish pre-service teacher education programmes.

In the design experiment fourteen experienced teachers participated, all of them mentors supervising student teachers during SBTE. The DE was designed to provide mentors enhanced ability to direct attention to the so-called tacit dimensions of teachers’ procedural knowledge. The aim was to see if that could improve the quality of students' SBTE, and streamline student teachers’ professional learning in the direction of skill and professional integrity. The DE took its starting point in an earlier research project’s results, where experienced teachers’ procedural knowledge was examined. The results revealed that this sort of teacher knowledge initially was perceived as verbally elusive. However, with certain tools it was possible to formulate (Lindqvist & Nordänger, 2007). The keys to “lock up” teachers’ professional language was several research methods (e.g. Dialogue seminar, see Göranzon & Hammarén, 2006).

These methods were also used in the DE. However, the aim was now to see if teachers, with better-formulated procedural teacher knowledge, could be better formative and summative assessors during SBTE. The content, to be developed in the DE, was taken from the earlier research project’s results: how the participating teachers in their pedagogic practices succeed to establish a distinct, obvious, fair, emphatic and explicit pedagogical framework. On one hand this concerned establishing a framework to each one of the children (Lindqvist, 2010), and on the other hand to the hole group of children (Nordänger, 2010). These skills were by the teachers perceived as very important, but appeared as a tacit dimension: they could hardly be formulated in a traditional verbally way. However, with the support of the method Dialogue seminar, the teachers could think and write narratives about them, and orally communicate them.

• Is it possible to identify qualitative better assessment processes within student-teaching conferences after a design experiment among mentors, regarding teachers’ procedural knowledge about establishing a distinct, obvious, fair, emphatic and explicit pedagogical framework?
• In what way will the student-teaching conferences’ participators (mentors and student teachers) express that the assessment processes have improved or not?

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