The challenge for initial teacher education (ITE) is to prepare teachers who are capable, professional and able to assist all learners to achieve success in education as they work in an increasingly complex environment and teach in more sophisticated ways to meet the demands inherent in modern school curricula. Are our graduates ready to assume responsibility for children’s learning? How do we, as teacher educators, make these judgments of their readiness to teach? 

One key site for determining teacher candidate suitability, or otherwise, for entry into the profession is the practicum (Hegender, 2010). Although the timing, extent and organisation of practicum placements may vary within programmes, they occupy a significant timeframe within all initial teacher education programmes. Although practicum is generally accepted as a core element in teacher preparation

programmes (e.g., Hagger & McIntyre, 2006; Smith & Lev-Ari, 2005), the assessment of teacher candidates‘ competence during practicum appears to be particularly problematic, emerging as an international concern with researchers across the globe increasingly addressing this aspect of initial teacher education. European researchers including Tillema, Smith and Lesham, (2011) and Jonsson and Mattsson (2011) are some who have investigated the challenges associated with making practicum-linked summative decisions about teacher candidate practice and the consequential effects of such decision-making on both the assessors and the teacher candidates.

Assessing teacher candidates' progress requires clear understandings regarding the expectations of the teacher candidate held by each assessor. Additionally, the assessment of teachers has two main purposes, having both professional accountability and formative value. There may be considerable tension between the accountability and formative purposes of teacher assessment (Porter, Youngs & Odden, 2001), and this tension is certainly played out in the practicum where teacher candidates learn about the challenges and complexities of teaching in context, as well as having judgments made about their teaching practice. Yet the criteria for assessing the practicum are often not well articulated and procedures for making judgments are frequently not made explicit for teacher candidates, mentor teachers, or university supervisors. Little is known about how these judgments of 'readiness to teach' are made. Such judgments involve both conscious and unconscious processes.

In order to better understand judgments of ‘readiness to teach‘ we need to tap into the understandings and evidences utilized by teachers and faculty in making their decisions about prospective teachers. This paper reports on a study of practicum-associated judgment-making of teacher candidates’ readiness to teach. The study is framed by Social Judgment Theory (Hammond, Rohrbough, Mumpower & Adelman, 1977), a theory developed to give direction to research on judgement through a careful identification and analysis of the context of the judgement and the cues and policies (underlying constructs) used by judges. In this paper we show how assessors’ judgment cues and policies can be captured through the use of vignettes (Jenkins, Bloor, Fischer, Berney, & Neale, 2010) of teacher candidate practice. We show how experts may disagree in their judgments of teacher candidates’ readiness to teach (Mumpower & Stewart, 1996).

Hagger, H., & McIntyre, D. (2006). Learning teaching from teachers: Realising the potential of school based teacher education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Haigh, M., Ell, F., & Mackisack, V. (September, 2012). Judging student teachers’ readiness to teach. Paper presented at the European Conference of Educational Research, Cadiz, Spain. Hammond, K., Rohrbaugh, J., Mumpower, J., & Adelman, L. (1977). Social judgment theory: Applications in policy formation. In M. Kaplan & S. Schwartz (Eds.), Human judgment and decision processes in applied settings (pp. 1-29). New York: Academic Press. Hegender, H. (2010). The assessment of teacher candidates‘ academic and professional knowledge in school-based teacher education. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 54(2), 151–171. Jenkins, N. A., Bloor, M., Fischer, J., Berney, L., Neale, J. (2010). Putting it in context: the use of vignettes in qualitative interviewing. Qualitative Research, 10(2), 175-198. Jonnson, A., & Mattsson, M. (2011). Assessing teacher competency during practicum. In M. Mattsson, T. V. Eilertsen and D. Rorrison (Eds.) A practicum turn in teacher education. The Netherlands: Sense Publications. Mumpower, J. & Stewart, T. (1996). Expert judgment and expert disagreement. Thinking and Reasoning, 2(2/3), 191-211. Porter, A. C., Youngs, P., & Odden, A. (2001). Advances in teacher assessments and their uses. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed., pp. 259–297). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Smith, K., & Lev-Ari, L. (2005). The place of the practicum in pre-service teacher education: The voice of the students. Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 33, 289–302. Tillema, H., Smith, K., & Lesham, S. (2011). Dual roles – conflicting purposes: a comparative study on perceptions on assessment in mentoring relations during practicum. European Journal of Teacher Education, 34(2), 139-159.