Assessors’ perspectives of an oral assessment within a teaching performance assessment

Australia has recently implemented Teaching Performance Assessments (TPAs) as a national accreditation requirement to assess final year preservice teachers’ classroom readiness. In 2019, an Australian university developed a TPA to meet this requirement, comprising three written components and one oral component. This exploratory study investigated 18 TPA assessors’ perceptions of the oral component. Focus group data revealed that both explicit and latent assessment criteria influenced assessors’ professional judgments of the oral component. A discourse competence framework was used to analyse the data, illustrating how preservice teachers’ personal experience and their professional and institutional discourse competence are evident in their orals. Thematic analysis revealed that benefits and issues of fairness and equity contributed to assessors’ perspectives about the value of the oral component.