An Investigation Of Teachers’ Conceptions Of Assessment Between Pre-service And In-service English Teachers

Teachers’ conceptions of assessment are teachers’ views or attitudes towards assessment.With the continuous deepening of evaluation reforms in various countries,there has been increasing recognition of the crucial role of teachers’ changing conceptions in assessment reforms.The reason why teachers’ assessment conceptions become so important is that once the beliefs are built up,they also will become stable and then affect the assessment practices.Researches had indicated that adequate preparation of pre-service English teachers depends on the beliefs that they conceive.Hence,it is important to enhance the present study and correct teachers’ conceptions of assessment for pre-service and in-service English teachers.This study mainly intends to answer three questions as follows:(1)What are the conceptions of assessment among Chinese pre-service and in-service English teachers?(2)What are the differences between pre-service and in-service English teachers on their assessment conceptions?(3)Do demographic characteristics(i.e.,gender,title,years of teaching,assessment training,university level)have an impact on teachers’ conceptions of assessment? If any,what are the influencing factors?This study adopted both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate both pre-service and in-service English teachers’ conceptions assessment.A cluster sampling of 445 English teachers was carried out,using Brown’s Chinese version of Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment.There were 408 copies valid,including 166in-service English teachers and 242 pre-service English teachers.The quantitative study aimed to understand how pre-service and in-service English teachers perceive assessment,and find out the differences between two these two samples,and the influencing factors.An independent T-test,ANOVA were applied to analyze the data from field investigation.Qualitative data was collected from six pre-service English teachers and eight in-service English teachers.The analysis of the transcripts was undertaken separately by content analysis,and the group tendencies were compared and collated.The conclusions were drawn as follows:1.Both pre-service English teachers and in-service English teachers held a relatively similar tendency of assessment conceptions.They all agreed with the“Improvement” and “Accountability” conceptions.They believed that assessment was used to improve students’ learning,promote the overall development of students,and improve teachers’ teaching quality.Meanwhile,they perceived that assessment was used to make students,teachers,and schools accountable;also,assessment enabled students to achieve good performance in examinations.In addition,they disagreed with the “Irrelevance” conception.Furthermore,the results showed that there was a significantly high positive relationship between Improvement and Accountability conceptions.2.An analysis of the differences between the two samples found that the average score of in-service English teachers was significantly higher than that of pre-service teachers in “Improvement” conception;in the conception of“Accountability”,the score of in-service English teachers in the dimension of“Examination” was significantly higher than that of pre-service teachers,mainly due to the teaching experience and the pressure of examinations every academic year.3.Analysis of variance by demographics showed that years of teaching experience,types of university,assessment training,grade levels,class size,and title all made a significant difference in teachers’ conceptions of assessment.Meanwhile,further analysis of interview data indicated that the assessment context or school policies also had an impact on teachers’ assessment conceptions.