From guesswork to growth understanding how preservice teachers interpret and enact appraisal within a teacher performance assessment

In Australia, the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA) is a capstone summative assessment that evaluates preservice teachers’ ‘classroom readiness’ across five practices: planning, teaching, assessing, reflecting and appraising. In our work with preservice teachers, appraising the impact of teaching emerged as the most conceptually and practically challenging practice. To understand how preservice teachers interpreted and enacted appraisal, this exploratory case study analysed 15 GTPA submissions that met standards in the first four practices but not in appraisal. The findings highlight common issues, including conflating appraisal with general reflection, difficulty interpreting and applying data meaningfully, and presenting narrative accounts rather than evaluative analysis. These misunderstandings stemmed from discourse-related challenges, as commonly applied meanings of ‘appraisal’ and ‘narrative’ diverged from the GTPA’s intended use. This study suggests the need for teacher educators to emphasise language precision, provide exemplars, and scaffold assessment literacy to support a deeper understanding of preservice teachers’ impact on student outcomes.