Pre-Service English Teachers’ Conception of Assessment and Their Future Assessment Practices in A Turkish Context

Abstract

The study was conducted in order to reveal pre-service English teachers’ conceptions of assessments regarding improvement, school accountability, student accountability and irrelevance as well as relations between different conceptions purposes. It also aimed to examine how participants’ conceptions of assessment differs in relations to their differences of gender, years of learning English, age, grade point average and grade levels. 204 pre-service English teachers participated in the study. The data were collected using Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment Abridged Inventory (TCoA-IIIA) which is in 6 points Likert scale format ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The obtained quantitative data were analyzed by Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 23) program. Descriptive statistics indicated that improvement conception had the highest value among all and participants were moderately agreed that assessment is used for improvement purposes. On the contrary, conceptions of irrelevance were unearthed as having the lowest value and agreement level of all. Then, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was used to investigate relations between conception levels. Correlation results indicated that improvement, school accountability and student accountability conceptions were positively and strongly correlated with each other. On the other hand, there was a negative correlation between improvement and irrelevance conceptions were found out. A multivariate test of variance (MANOVA) was utilized to examine any effects of individual differences on participants’ conceptions of assessment. Multivariate test results indicated that even if there were differences in descriptive results for each variable, grade level is the only independent variables making statistically significant difference on participants’ conceptions of assessment. Then, it was seen that even though grade level made a statistically significant difference among grade levels, results of the Bonferroni adjustment presented no significance difference when the variables considered separately. Finally, descriptive results from each item were further interpreted with reference to previous studies on conception of assessment in the literature. It was deduced that pre-service English teachers will mostly benefit from formative assessment methods even though the tool can range. Providing feedback to their prospective students will be of high priority for conducting assessment. Secondly, it was interpreted that summative assessment would play a key role for accountability. Therefore, pre-service English teachers would use both formative and assessment assessment tools at the same to to serve for different purposes.