Professional Development

What Do Teachers Think Of Assessment?

Teachers' beliefs about what assessment is for and how it works may prove a vital platform for professional development, as Gavin Brown explains.
High school students sitting an exam

The Assessment Battleground

Historically, in many societies, assessment has been simply an end-of-course (or semester, year, or programme) formal examination. That assessment system meant teachers acted as coaches and instructors, whereas external bodies or agencies made decisions about the quality of individual student performance. School leaders looked at examination or qualification success rates and used that information to evaluate teacher performance (e.g. a good teacher had a higher than predicted rate of success compared to the ability level of the class the teacher had). Likewise, parents tended to evaluate teacher quality based on whether their child passed. This was not the purpose of examinations, but was a use to which various stakeholders put them.

Policy reform throughout the 1980s and 90s, now associated with the Global Education Reform Movement[1], led to the development of standardised tests of student achievement as a formal government mechanism to hold schools and teachers accountable for their use of state or public resources. This approach gained momentum in England because there was a perception that 'the lack of an examination or national system of testing at the end of primary school left this sector of schooling wide open to criticism of performance standards across the primary age range (5-11).'[2] Hence the introduction of Standardised Assessment Tasks (SATs) at Key Stages of schooling (i.e. ages 7, 9, 11 and 14) and many other mechanisms with the 1988 National Curriculum.[3]

A substantial response against Key Stage census testing, combined with the publication of league tables[4], led to substantial resistance to using standardised tests to make judgments about schools.[5] That reform movement, known as Assessment for Learning (AFL), insisted the proper place of assessment was a formative, improvement-oriented perspective in which teachers involved students in interactive practices that would deepen understanding and reduce the consequences attached to assessment scores or reports.[6]

The pedagogical priority of AFL[7] meant that assessment was no longer used to judge teachers, schools or students; instead, it was meant to serve better learning outcomes. Nonetheless, the tension between governmental desire to collect data on the effectiveness of schools and educators’ insistence that assessment serve learning created a contested cognitive space for teachers.

These contextual factors (i.e. assessment for learning versus assessment as accountability) generate considerable tensions for teachers.[8] On the one hand, they are encouraged to use assessment to improve student learning, and on the other, they are judged by performance on end-of-cycle standardised tests. This has required a substantial shift in teachers’ assessment identity[9] from their traditional identity as instructors and coaches to one of being judges or evaluators, albeit for formative goals. However, simultaneously, teachers have to ensure student test performance makes the school, their colleagues and themselves look good in the eyes of the public and government.

An expectable outcome of this expectation is that teachers would behave in such a way as to ensure those expectations are fulfilled, a known effect of accountability.[10] This has led to unfortunate practices in which teachers (1) teach students directly what will be on the test, (2) use old tests that have invalid comparison norms, (3) teach items in class based on an early copy of the official test, (4) encourage low-performing students to not come to school on testing days, (5) give hints during testing sessions and (6) correct student test responses before sending the tests to a central agency.[11] Indeed, teachers involved in that last practice were jailed in Atlanta, USA for falsifying student performances on school accountability tests.[i]

Beliefs and Purposes of Assessment

Extensive research has established that teachers have existing beliefs about the nature and purpose of assessment.[12] These beliefs matter[13] because beliefs filter what individuals pay attention to, frame how individuals understand that information and guide their actions or behaviours around the phenomenon in question, in this case assessment. Further, teacher beliefs are strongly shaped by their own experiences as students.[14] Consequently, they tend to be resistant to change, even when policies require different assessment practices.[15]

School children sitting an exam in the late afternoon

Thus, because teachers enact assessment policy in schools and classrooms, it is essential to know what they believe and how they might use assessments. Their beliefs may also constitute an interesting possibility for professional development.

I propose that understanding teacher conceptualisation of assessment should focus on the nature and purposes of assessment[16] rather than the format.[17] Consequently, the first question to ask is: 'Is assessment useful?'

For those who say no, their reasons tend to lie with the narrowness of assessment compared to the breadth and depth of the curriculum[18], the unjustifiable power of assessment to control children[19] and the stigma attached to children who are labelled negatively as a result of low scores. Related to these negative views of largely formal assessments, many classroom practitioners consider that with their extensive interactions with a child, they simply know better than a test who knows what and who needs to be taught what.

For those who say yes, the second question is: 'For which specific purpose?' There appear to be three possible purposes of assessment: (#1) to inform improved teaching and learning, (#2) to judge the quality of student performance and (#3) to judge the quality of instruction and schooling. Clearly, in the English context, public examinations (e.g. GCSE, A-Level) aim at purpose #2; SATs aim at purpose #3 and AFL aims at purpose #1. The challenge for teacher professional development is that educational assessment can mean all three purposes at the same time and it is important to tease out carefully which idea teachers have in mind.

Research Exploring Teacher Conceptions of Assessment

The self-report inventory

To contribute to possible professional development, the Teachers Conceptions of Assessment self-report inventory[20] was developed to explore not just how much teachers agree with each of these four conceptions but also how those attitudes relate to each other. The inventory has four major scales addressing the answers to the research questions. 'Improvement' says assessment is useful for informing better teaching and student learning. 'Student Accountability' says assessment is used to evaluate and judge student learning. 'School Accountability' says assessment is used to evaluate teachers and schools. 'Irrelevance' says that assessment is bad and ignored.

The first studies with New Zealand primary and secondary school teachers[21] found statistically equivalent responses to the items but higher scores among secondary teachers for Student Accountability, a sensible response given how those teachers are involved in judging students for credits and grades toward the National Certificate for Educational Achievement in the last three years of schooling. Both groups gave the highest agreement to Improvement and the lowest to Irrelevance, with a strong negative correlation (r = -.74) between the two scales, indicating that, as assessment was for improvement, it was not ignored.

Simultaneously, Irrelevance had a small positive relationship with Student Accountability (r = .30) and a weak negative one with School Accountability (r = -.14). Together, these associations suggest evaluating students is a bad thing, while evaluating schools is a little bit relevant. In contrast, Improvement was positively but weakly related to Student Accountability (r = .23) and much more with School Accountability (r = .47). These relations suggest that evaluating students does not really help them improve, but schools that bring about improvement are good quality schools.

International comparisons

International comparative research began in Queensland, a jurisdiction with a very low-stakes formative assessment policy in primary schooling and a secondary school policy in which teachers awarded grades for school qualifications. Equivalent structures were found between New Zealand and Queensland primary teachers[22], but structural differences were required to account for Queensland secondary teachers.[23]

Like New Zealand, Improvement was moderately related to School Accountability (r = .43) and weakly linked to Student Accountability (r = .08), suggesting good schools improve outcomes with assessment but do not judge learners. Irrelevance was strongly negative to Improvement (r = -.50), indicating assessment is relevant. Simultaneously, Irrelevance was strongly related to Student Accountability (r = .64), suggesting judging students with assessment was a bad thing. On the other hand, the relationship of Irrelevance to School Accountability was close to zero (r = .06), indicating no systematic pattern in thinking existed.

Thus, in Queensland and New Zealand, both jurisdictions with almost zero assessment in primary school and active involvement of secondary teachers in the qualification system, teacher conceptions of assessment were strongly improvement-oriented, while seeking to protect both students and schools from unfair, illegitimate consequences.

A foray into the high-stakes, formal testing world of Hong Kong and China revealed quite different emphases in teachers’ conceptions of assessment. The most striking thing about the Hong Kong survey[24] was the very strong association between Improvement and Student Accountability (r = .91), which was understood to mean that evaluating students was seen as a way of improving their learning; a construct which is deeply embedded in how testing has been used historically in the Chinese culture.[25]

As in previous studies, there was a strong negative association between Improvement and Irrelevance (r = -.56) and a moderate association between Improvement and School Accountability (r = .65). These patterns indicate Hong Kong teachers think assessment for improvement is relevant and shows how good a school is. Unlike before, assessment for Student Accountability was negatively associated with Irrelevance (r = -.26) and weakly associated with School Accountability (r = -.05), together suggesting Hong Kong teachers thought testing students was not bad for them, while not having a systematic view on whether evaluating schools was good or bad.

With the development of a highly contextualised Chinese version of the inventory[26], we found that in the People’s Republic of China[27], teachers most strongly endorsed using assessment to help learning and that assessments were error-prone. Accountability, which contained ideas of controlling schools and teachers through error-prone examinations, was strongly and positively related to Improvement, which consisted of improving student development and learning through accurate evaluation (r = .80). In contrast, Irrelevance was weakly and inversely related to Improvement (r = -.22), and positively related to Accountability (r = .28), making clear that improvement was seen as relevant, while holding schools and teachers accountable was seen as a bad thing.

What the Research Tells Us

These studies show us several important principles. The first: teachers' conceptions of assessment depend very much on the policy and cultural context in which they are employed, and teachers must engage with and internalise societal norms to function within a schooling context.

A second principle is that assessment matters to teachers who generally want to use it to improve student learning. This means that teacher beliefs are not the obstacle to improving how teachers use assessment. Rather, if the context in which teachers work imposes unfair and negative consequences for poor student scores, without considering factors that make high performance hard to achieve, then teachers are likely to think assessment is irrelevant (e.g. New York teachers who gained in knowledge but persisted in their negative view of assessment[28]).

I have argued that discovering the pattern of teachers’ conceptions of assessment is a helpful start in professionally developing how teachers use assessment for improvement.[29] Knowing how teachers perceive what assessment is for and how it works is a good starting point for professional development. However, because conceptions are sensitive to context, professional developers should consider whether there are obstacles in the policy and regulatory environment that create negative views about assessment.

Perhaps the problem lies in a policy which uses low-quality standardised tests that do not provide diagnostic insights to teachers when they need them.[30] Perhaps the problem lies in managerial practices in which assessment tools are used by school leaders to fulfil accountability expectations rather than by classroom teachers who need to discover if their teaching has worked for all.[31] Clearly, developing teachers to have a positive attitude toward improved teaching and learning is easy; what is hard is ensuring teachers have the tools, knowledge and policy that support them to discover bad news (i.e. my teaching did not work, my students don’t understand what I taught). Only in such a context is professional development around assessment likely to be effective.[32]

A Checklist for Professional Development Assessment Policy and Practice

Some key messages emerge from these findings about the crucial importance of teacher conceptions of assessment. These may help to provide a helpful checklist of assessment practice for teachers and leaders:

  • Teachers generally believe that assessment can contribute to better understanding of what teachers need to know about how their teaching is working.
  • Assessments have to be designed to tell teachers what they need to know about student progress and needs.
  • Leaders need to allow teachers to discover ‘bad news’ without shame or blame; rather, they need to welcome the discovery of failure to guide improved teaching.

Gavin T. L. Brown is Professor of Education in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at The University of Auckland, where he directs the Quantitative Data Analysis and Research unit and the Learning Sciences and Psychological Studies in Education group in the School of Learning and Professional Practice. He can be contacted by email at: gt.brown@auckland.ac.nz


[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Public_Schools_cheating_scandal


References

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