Validation of the CONVAL scale on teachers’ conceptions of assessment.

Abstract

The article presents the validation of a scale on teachers’ conceptions of assessment, a “latent” but fundamental dimension of the teacher’s assessment competence. This scale can represent a useful research tool in connection with the design of initial and continuing teacher education as well as for monitoring innovative teaching and assessment practices in the school context. The exploration of the factorial structure of the scale – administered to a non-probabilistic sample of 345 students participating in a university pre-service training course in the academic year 2020/2021 – found 4 factors corresponding to different and well-defined visions of assessment. Each factor, intended as subscale, obtained good reliability indexes and showed adherence to the theoretical construct. This first analysis of the metrological characteristics of the scale therefore allows to design further validation procedures carried out on larger and more heterogeneous samples.