Illustrating Situated Manifestations of Assessment Literacy in Higher Professional Education

This study explores how teachers’ assessment literacy manifests within assessment practices in higher professional education. While assessment literacy is a multifaceted and dynamic construct, little is known about how it unfolds in practice. Showing how assessment literacy emerges and how its meaning is shaped within assessment-related situations provides nuanced insights for context-sensitive professional development. To gain these insights, teachers’ enactment of assessment literacy was examined in nine diverse assessment-related situations using a conceptual framework comprising eight interconnected aspects. Observations were used beforehand to contextualise the assessment-related situations. Data were then collected through follow-up interviews, each of which began with a LEGO® Serious Play® activity designed to elicit participants’ interpretations. The eight aspects served as the analytical framework to code the data and examine which aspects were present, how they were interpreted, and how they interacted within each situation. The findings demonstrate that different aspects of assessment literacy become more or less prominent, take on different meanings, and interrelate differently within each situation. The study refines the conceptual understanding of teachers’ assessment literacy by illustrating how its manifestations vary within professional assessment practices, showing it as a dynamic, socially situated construct of interrelated aspects.