Developing pre-service chemistry teachers’ assessment literacy using a mentoring scheme

Effective teaching in 21st-century education needs to infuse formative assessment tasks into students’ personalized learning. This requires teachers to develop their assessment literacy so that they are able to design high-quality formative assessment tasks and provide students with constructive and timely feedback for meaningful conceptual change and self-directed learning. A project was conducted to develop pre-service science teachers’ assessment literacy. The project consists of three stages: (1) The project team organized and conducted a series of workshops to provide participants with sufficient knowledge of the conceptual change, metacognition and application of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) for diagnostic purposes; (2) The participants were grouped and intensively shadowed by mentors to develop high-quality MCQs with feedbacks and produce well-planned short teaching videos; and (3) The participants were guided to make reflection in terms of assessor identity after studying the feedbacks from the secondary school teachers and students used the developed materials in their learning and teaching. To examine the project’s effects, we developed a 20-item survey instrument that assesses participants’ perceptions of their performance assessment literacy. The instrument covers three aspects: design of assessment tasks, providing students with feedback, and instruction based on assessment data. Pre-test and posttest were administered to study the project’s effects, where participants rated their views on the items on a 5-point Likert scale. We found that participants’ AL significantly developed after completing the project. Furthermore, the project produced a strong effect on the development of participants’ AL concerning the design of assessment tasks. Copyright © 2025 All rights are reserved by Chi Keung Chan.