The complexity of teachers’ conceptions of assessment: tensions between the needs of schools and students

By Lois R. Harris, Gavin T. L. Brown. 2009

113 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Teachers’ conceptions of assessment are important as they shape their usage of assessment practices. This study used a phenomenographic approach to examine the various purposes a sample of 26 New Zealand teachers ascribed to assessment. Seven purposes were discussed: compliance, external reporting, reporting to parents, extrinsically motivating students, organising group instruction, teacher use for individualising learning, and joint teacher‐student use for individualising learning. This study showed that teachers held complex conceptions of assessment and described using different assessments for differing purposes. It highlighted how teachers must consider divergent stakeholder interests when selecting assessments for students, balancing the needs of the society, the school, and the pupil. The data emphasised the particularly strong tension between what teachers feel is best for students versus what is deemed necessary for school accountability.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5126761bb70424459d92eda3d2da69504d902f8f

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Citations in the corpus

Chinese teachers’ conceptions of assessment for and of learning: Six competing and complementary purposes (2015, methodology): “This inductive approach has been used successfully to investigate how (1) students understand the nature of learning (Marton & Booth, 1996), (2) how teachers understand teaching (Gao & Watkins, 2001) and (3) how teachers understand the purposes of assessment (Harris & Brown, 2009).”
Queensland teachers’ conceptions of assessment: The impact of policy priorities on teacher attitudes (2011, unknown): “The model we use (Author1 & Harris, 2009) posits that societal and cultural contexts determine the nature of policy priorities; that policy priorities – including reforms or innovations affect teachers’ beliefs and attitudes; and that these in turn influence the translation of policy into practice…”
Mixing interview and questionnaire methods: Practical problems in aligning data (2010, unknown): “To ensure that a robust analysis of the interview data was conducted, the interview data were initially analysed by the first author using the phenomenographic method (Marton, 1981, 1986) to identify the range of conceptions within the data set; these results are available in Harris & Brown (2009).”