Reflections on designing multiple-choice items for large-scale assessments of student teachers’ visual and critical visual literacy knowledge and practices

Background: The current Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) for teaching languages and literacies in South African schools includes visual literacy components in all grades and thus teachers need to be visually literate, to be critical viewers of the visual, and to know how to teach visual and critical visual literacy. Objectives: The aim of this research was to investigate the possibilities of designing multiple-choice items that attempt to assess student teachers’ visual and critical visual literacy content and pedagogic knowledge. Method: In this reflective case study we present, discuss, and reflect on examples of multiple-choice items designed for the assessment of components of the Primary Teacher Education Project (PrimTEd). Our reflections are informed by literature in the fields of visual literacy and critical visual literacy education. Results: Sourcing socio-culturally inclusive, multimodal texts and creating appropriate classroom teaching scenarios on which to base questions that comply with the criterion of test fairness is challenging to achieve in any test format. It is particularly difficult to achieve when constrained by a multiple-choice format. Conclusion: Multiple-choice items can be used to assess some aspects of student teachers’ visual and critical visual literacy, such as discourse-specific terminology, explanations of terminology, and choices of classroom teaching strategies. However, alternative question forms or tasks have greater affordances for assessing other aspects of student teachers’ ability to read still and moving images and multimodal texts with understanding and criticality, and to teach learners how to do so. Contribution: The article contributes to the field of visual and critical visual literacy assessment in initial teacher education through an investigation of the affordances and limitations of the multiple-choice format commonly used in large-scale assessments.