Table Of ContentC A :
ONCEPTIONS OF SSESSMENT
U W A
NDERSTANDING HAT SSESSMENT
MEANS TO TEACHERS AND STUDENTS
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C A :
ONCEPTIONS OF SSESSMENT
U W A
NDERSTANDING HAT SSESSMENT
MEANS TO TEACHERS AND STUDENTS
GAVIN T. L. BROWN
Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
New York
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Brown,Gavin T. L.
Conceptions of assessment : understanding what assessment means to teachers and students /
Gavin T. L. Brown.
p. cm.
ISBN (cid:28)(cid:26)(cid:27)(cid:16)(cid:20)(cid:16)(cid:25)(cid:20)(cid:22)(cid:21)(cid:23)(cid:16)(cid:23)(cid:25)(cid:26)(cid:16)(cid:27)(cid:3)(cid:11)(cid:72)(cid:37)(cid:82)(cid:82)(cid:78)(cid:12)
1. Educational test and measurements—New Zealand. I. Title.
LB3058.N4B76 2008
371.260993—dc22 2007052106
Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Chapter 1 Introduction to Conceptions 1
Chapter 2 Conceptions of Assessment 13
Chapter 3 Related Conceptions in Education 35
Chapter 4 Contexts of Research: Education in
New Zealand and Queensland 49
Chapter 5 Research Methods for Investigating Conceptions 61
Chapter 6 Teachers‘ Conceptions of Assessment 91
Chapter 7 Students‘ Conceptions of Assessment with
Gerrit H. F. Hirschfeld, University of Münster, Germany 119
Chapter 8 Integration of Teachers‘ Conceptions of Assessment,
Teaching, Learning, Curriculum, and Efficacy 133
Chapter 9 Implications and Future Directions 153
References 165
Index 187
PREFACE
Assessment is one of the most commonplace events in education. For example, teachers
assess students and report those results to families; students report assessment results to
employers and universities in hope of improving their life chances; the qualities of schools are
determined in part through the assessment of students; students assess teachers and share their
insights with peers; principals and administrators report, sometimes with undeserved glee, the
results of assessments to politicians and parents. Readers who have been to school were
assessed many times. Some readers of this book will have been assessors, examiners, testers
and not just the assessed. But we need not restrict assessment to schooling. Our driving, our
attractiveness, our wealth, the quality of our work, and so on are observed, judged, evaluated,
and given meaning by those around us.
As a consequence of our assessment experiences, we have all developed understandings
of, beliefs about, or ways of thinking about what assessment is, what it‘s for, and how we feel
about it. This book is about how people in education (i.e., teachers and students) conceive of
assessment and reports research conducted in New Zealand and Australia that illuminates
what those conceptions look like and how they relate to educational outcomes and practices.
The research is driven by a very simple and unoriginal notion: what we believe about the
nature and purpose of something influences what we do around that something and our
practices determine, in part, outcomes. In the case of this book, we are examining how
teachers and students conceive of assessment and, where possible, examining how those
conceptions relate to other important facets of education and what students achieve on
educational assessments.
This research is important for obvious reasons. Assessment is done in schools by and to
teachers and students. The impact and effectiveness of those assessments is shaped, in part,
by the conceptions teachers and students have of the purpose and nature of assessment. If they
believe assessment is all about blaming schools and teachers for poor test scores, then the
Lake Wobegon effect is a very predictable consequence. And likewise, if the teachers
conceive that assessment is useful for improving the quality of teaching, then even an
externally mandated assessment may actually have some benefit. While teachers and students
are active participants in the assessment process, we need to understand what their
conceptions are and what they mean.
Teaching involves several essential processes—curriculum, subject matter and
epistemology, teaching and learning, and assessment-evaluation. The nature of what is taught
(whether it be a global curriculum, a specific subject, or the nature of knowledge), how that
content is taught and learned, and how that teaching and/or learning is assessed and evaluated
viii Gavin T.L. Brown
are core processes in education and schooling. The study of teaching needs to engage with
how these are understood by the teacher. After all, ―in the practical context it is the teacher,
not the learning theorist, who is the final authority on learning; the teacher, not the
sociologist, who is the final authority on the social development of children; the teacher, not
the psychologist or artist, who is the final authority on the creativity of children; the teacher,
not the scientist, who is the final authority on the science kids learn‖ (Elbaz, 1983, p. 17).
Thus, how teachers conceive of these processes is important to policy-makers, school-leaders,
teacher-educators, researchers, parents, and students.
However, there is little published research about how people involved in education
conceive of assessment. There is much written about how assessment ought to be understood
and used, but much less about how people actually understand it. There has been much
research into how teachers and students conceive of teaching, learning, and subject matter.
We have powerful frameworks for investigating the meaning of these processes, but we have
much weaker understandings of how assessment can be understood. Thus, as one of the key
processes of education it behooves us to understand how assessment is conceived.
The first section of this book is a review of the literature around teachers‘ conceptions.
The book begins with a clarification and description of what I mean by a conception. It then
describes four major conceptions of assessment as gleaned from the literature about
educational assessment—what experts have said about how assessment can and ought to be
used and what researchers have said about how it is really used. Then we will journey through
the literature that describes empirical research into how teachers and students have actually
conceived of assessment independently of how anyone might suggest they ought to conceive
of it. But assessment is not the only educational process about which teachers have personal
understandings or conceptions. The meaning of a teacher‘s conceptions of assessment is
extended when we examine how assessment is seen in light of how the teacher conceives
other important educational processes. Thus, the next chapter provides an overview of the
literature and research into teachers‘ conceptions of teaching, learning, curriculum, and
efficacy.
The second section focuses on the empirical work I have conducted in New Zealand and
Australia. The policy and practice contexts of these two jurisdictions may be relatively
unknown to many readers and so I will describe the educational contexts in which these
studies are situated so that their meaning and applicability to other populations can be fairly
judged. In a brief chapter, I will review the main methods used in these studies to collect the
data and analyze the results—techniques such as exploratory and confirmatory factor
analysis, multi-battery factor analysis, structural equation modeling, multidimensional
scaling, questionnaire design, phenomenography are quickly reviewed. The reader need not
fear that this will become a research methodology textbook; rather this chapter means that a
lot of technical information is provided once in one convenient location and technical issues
should not have to interfere with the reader‘s grasp of the substantive details. Then I embark
on a journey into how teachers in New Zealand and Queensland, Australia have conceived of
assessment. This is followed by our research in New Zealand with secondary students as to
their conceptions of assessment and how those conceptions relate to their academic
performance. Then the relationship of teachers‘ conceptions of assessment to the other
educational processes will be examined—we will seek to understand how assessment is
integrated with other practices and processes.
