Changing assessment perceptions and practices in Chinese college English classrooms

Abstract

This study examines teachers’ and students’ perceptions and practices of classroom assessment in an English curriculum innovation at a Chinese university. It slices through the layers of the innovation onion to reveal the agentive spaces in which teachers and students interpret and enact assessment for learning (AfL) in first-year college English classrooms.

This study adopts a case study approach. A university which actively engaged itself in a change towards AfL was selected as a critical case. Individual and focus group interviews, classroom observations and a documentary analysis were conducted to collect a variety of data from a key change initiator, a faculty leader, three teachers and their students. Data analysis generally followed the qualitative-analysis protocols established by Miles and Huberman (1994).

The three teachers demonstrated different awareness of and competence in assessing higher-order learning skills, enhancing learning-facilitating feedback and transforming the students’ role in assessment and feedback. A recurring theme emerging from the comparison of teachers’ assessment practices is the distinction between convergent and divergent approaches to planning, framing, conducting and using assessment. Teachers’ assessment knowledge and their perceptions of English language learning and assessment interplayed with their assessment practices. Perceptual gaps were detected between teachers and their students with regard to the learning goals, the content and forms of classroom assessment, and the way to deliver and use feedback. The interplay between assessment perceptions and practices was interpreted from a perspective of Wenger’s social theory of learning. The perceptual mismatches between different stakeholders were bridged through conferring legitimacy of reification and participation to members in other communities of practices. This study contributes to an enhanced understanding of culturally appropriate ways to implement AfL in a Chinese tertiary education context. A convergent-divergent classroom assessment continuum is proposed based on classroom assessment data. An exploratory model is developed to understand change stakeholders’ legitimate peripheral participation in assessment innovation. This model advances the argument that change stakeholders’ engagement in assessment innovation is interdependent and interrelated. Coordination, transparency, and the negotiability of assessment practices and standards were found to facilitate teacher and student learning.

Implications on disseminating assessment changes are discussed on the basis of empirical findings and theoretical abstraction. This study also incorporates a discussion on the implications for teaching Chinese first-year university students and the design, use, and validation of a classroom observation scheme. Future research is needed to explore whether and how teachers’ and students’ cognitive and metacognitive gains through their participation in assessment innovation can be sustained and transferred to teaching and learning scenarios in the future and/or in other disciplines.