Conceptions of Assessment: Understanding What Assessment Means to Teachers and Students PDF
Preview Conceptions of Assessment: Understanding What Assessment Means to Teachers and Students
C A : ONCEPTIONS OF SSESSMENT U W A NDERSTANDING HAT SSESSMENT MEANS TO TEACHERS AND STUDENTS No part of this digital document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means. The publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this digital document, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained herein. This digital document is sold with the clear understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, medical or any other professional services. 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 Copyright © 2008 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. 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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA 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.
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