Teachers’ beliefs about assessment

The ability to appropriate assessment for social control is evident across national boundaries where high-stakes assessment practices are employed to control learners, teachers, and schools. The use of assessment for such purposes has been widely criticized, yet the practices continue and seem to expand (Nichols & Berliner, 2007). At the classroom level, motivational researchers have warned against the use of competition and external reinforcement as part of assessment practices as these approaches support a performance goal structure and garner negative effects for students’ intrinsic motivation (e.g., Ames & Archer, 1988). The potential negative consequences of assessment practices combined with its ubiquitous nature in K-12 schools suggests that there are potentially a variety of beliefs that teachers may hold about assessment, that in conjunction with other beliefs and contextual influences, may influence the practices they employ in the classroom. Certainly, these beliefs will filter how preservice and practicing teachers interpret information about new approaches to assessment and frame their curriculum design and lesson planning (Fives & Buehl, 2012). It is with these concerns in mind that we undertook this investigation of the empirical research on K-12 preservice and practicing teachers’ beliefs about assessment.