Abstract:
The Malaysian school curriculum was revamped to reduce over-reliance on high-stakes examinations by increasing the use of classroom-based assessments. This shift has elicited conflicting responses from education stakeholders. Because teachers are central figures in implementing education policy, it is critical to understand the assessment conceptions they need to put into practice. This study surveyed 140 Malaysian secondary school science teachers with the Teacher Conceptions of Assessment (TCoA-III) and Practices of Assessment Inventory (PrAI) inventories. Four main assessment conceptions were identified following the New Zealand TCoA-III model, and five factors from the Hong Kong PrAI model were discovered. Structural equation modeling identified six statistically significant paths from TCoA-III factors to PrAI factors. Improvement beliefs strongly predicted diagnostic and improvement practices, while student accountability conception strongly predicted the practices of preparing for examinations and treating assessment as irrelevant. School accountability and irrelevance conceptions strongly predicted the matching assessment practices. These results revealed commonalities with Chinese teachers working in public examination-dominated systems, suggesting that classroom-based assessments are not strongly formative. Still, Malaysian results are not strikingly different from Queensland secondary school teachers who viewed assessment as making students accountable despite working in a low-stakes examination environment.