Parents’ beliefs about assessment: A conceptual framework and findings from Finnish basic education

Abstract

The viewpoint of parents has been scarcely studied in classroom assessment research. We address this research gap by examining parents’ beliefs about assessment in the context of Finnish basic education (grades 1–9). A socioculturally oriented framework is developed to study the beliefs of parents. With this newly formulated framework, we qualitatively analyse parents' open-ended responses based a large-scale questionnaire study (N = 622). Our findings show that in the low-stakes assessment culture of Finland, parents largely framed assessment through a pedagogical conception that reflects the learning purposes of assessment. A societal conception of assessment was also strongly present, as parents believed that assessment should produce numerical data for the purposes of measurement and comparison. As a major contribution of this study, a six-dimensional conceptual framework for analyzing parents’ beliefs about classroom assessment is formulated and tested.