Policies and pre-service teacher perspectives on summative assessment literacy in Sweden and Finland

Education policies provide guidelines for testing and grading, but research on such prescriptions and prospective teacher perspectives is scarce. Hence, this qualitative investigation explored evidence-based policies juxtaposed with pre-service language teacher beliefs on summative assessment at three Nordic universities. The conceptual framework included teacher cognition and deliberation, while constructivist grounded theory guided the analysis of the data. The findings detected high expectations on graduate teachers’ summative assessment literacy in the education policies for Sweden and Finland. However, the participant-based data revealed that instructional alignment between teaching and testing should be reinforced in teacher education. Moreover, the pre-service teachers gave examples of perceived gaps between theoretical and practical literacies. Preferences for further training in deliberative and other practical approaches to summative assessment also emerged. Hence, some divergencies were detected between requirements in the respective national regulatory policies vis-à-vis stated beliefs. Proposals for enhancing the instruction in teacher education were introduced.