Developing Assessment Literacy for Classroom-Based Formative Assessment

Formative assessment (FA) has been increasingly recognised as a powerful tool to improve teaching and learning, and thereby increase educational effectiveness. As such, FA has been written into government directives and curriculum standards; and incorporated into teacher education programmes. At the classroom level, however, teachers have found FA a formidable task that is difficult to implement. This has been attributed to the teacher’s lack of assessment literacy, among other reasons. In this guest-editor introduction, we frame the special issue and its scope by highlighting the main issues involved. We then briefly introduce the 10 articles which we believe, taken together, advance our understanding of teacher formative assessment literacy and its development.