The objective of this research is to understand and interpret the initial teacher training in assessment and the discourse about classroom and national assessment with which pedagogy students graduate. Teacher training is studied in three universities: a state university, a traditional private university, and a post-eighties private university. In each university, threeacademic programs are addressed: language teaching, mathematics teaching, and elementary education. The prescribed curriculum for each academic program was analyzed, and final-year students and academics involved in teacher training were interviewed.
A common element in different academic programs is that the declared focus of training in assessment is constructivist. However, when developing various aspects of the evaluation process, behavioral elements are mixed with constructivist ones. Additionally, the formative function of assessment is emphasized in the course; however, the focus is on designing assessment instruments rather than providing descriptive feedback to students, which is a fundamental element of formative assessment. The designed assessment instruments are not applied, so they are not empirically tested, nor is the information about learning that can be obtained from their application analyzed. During the practice in school establishments, future teachers must adapt to the school’s rules, conducting traditional, summative assessment for grading purposes. In this formative space, they cannot innovate or learn in action what is theoretically communicated to them at the university, deepening the practical weakness of the training.
When analyzing the meanings of assessment among academics and pedagogy students, it is observed that the training conveys a similar view of classroom assessment among the institutions and academic programs studied. Three central propositions organize the meanings of assessment among academics and pedagogy students: assessment is a process; evaluating is not just grading; assessment must be fair. Based on this, future teachers consider that the best evaluative practice is informal, fully immersed in the process, and without any negative consequences for students. However, information from other research indicates that this informal practice can be arbitrary and reproduce social differences.
The problems in the training can be interpreted from the tension between the formative purpose and the selective purpose of assessment, which ultimately is an unresolved tension in an inclusive mass education system that coexists with the selective tradition of the system.
