PURPOSES OF ASSESSMENT

5.3.1 Before reviewing current Hong Kong practices in assessment, it would be helpful to set out the purposes which we believe school assessment should fulfill. We also highlight the need to ensure that assessment has a positive rather than a negative effect on teaching and learning.

5.3.2 Assessment is required to provide information to a variety of users for a variety of purposes. For example, a teacher may want to know whether his students have learned what they have been taught. Students may like to know how well they have done. Parents may like to know how their children are progressing.

Employers need to know whether their future employees will be able to perform adequately in the workplace and the Government needs to be able to monitor

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standards of achievement in and across schools from year to year. The various purposes for which users require information from assessment can be summarised as formative, summative, evaluative, predictive, comparative and selective. In the paragraphs below each of these is briefly discussed.

(a) Formative purpose

5.3.3 An important purpose of assessment is to provide information on students' strengths and weaknesses to teachers. This enables them to plan their future teaching so that it can build upon the strengths and address the weaknesses. With this information, students can decide what to concentrate on to help them meet their future educational or employment requirements. Parents may also use the information to support and guide their children in their studies.

(b) Summative purpose

5.3.4 Another purpose of assessment is to provide a clear and full description of what a student has achieved at the end of a course of study or stage of education. This information is useful in seeing how individual students or schools in general are performing at different stages in the education process. A cumulative record of achievement of each student may be kept to chart his or her progress through primary and secondary school.

(c) Evaluative purpose

5.3.5 A further purpose of assessment is to provide information on the basis of which the worth of education initiatives may be evaluated. By seeing whether students have learned effectively from a series of lessons, a teacher may judge the value of what is done in class and improve it accordingly. A school can use the results of students' assessment as a contributing factor in reviewing how well it

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is performing. Similarly, the Government may use the results to help evaluate the effectiveness of educational endeavours and to guide the use of resources.

(d) Predictive purpose

5.3.6 Assessment may be called upon to provide the information necessary to predict how students will perform in future studies.

(e) Comparative and selective purpose

5.3.7 Finally, assessment is often required as a means to select a certain proportion of students for the next stage of education of for employment on the basis of a comparison of their performances.

5.3.8 In addition to fulfilling the above informational purposes we believe that it is equally important to ensure that assessment has a positive effect on classroom teaching and learning. We see assessment as one element of a curriculum in which all the following elements interact

-(i) a syllabus in which there are prescribed targets and objectives, a suggested content and methodological strategies for achieving the targets;

(ii) resources in the form of teaching and learning material and equipment;

(iii) classroom teaching and learning; and (iv) assessment.

5.3.9 Since the above elements interact with each other, what is assessed and how it is assessed has an inevitable effect on what is taught, the choice of materials, and the

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methods of teaching and learning. It is, therefore, crucial to ensure that assessment reflects and supports the aims of education and has a healthy effect on teaching and learning. If the aim is to teach students to solve problems and communicate effectively, then assessment should evaluate their ability to carry out tasks, communicate their thoughts in speech and in writing and solve problems, rather than reproduce isolated bits of knowledge or tick boxes.

5.3.10 In order that assessments do not distort what should be taught and learnt in schools, it is important to ensure that they reflect an appropriate balance across the curriculum. If assessments only cover core subjects, for example, then it is likely that less emphasis will be placed on other subjects. Ill-conceived assessments may not only distort the balance across subjects but also that within a subject. If a language test, for example, places low priority on speaking skills in comparison to reading, listening, or writing skills then teachers will tend to pay less attention to the teaching of speaking, irrespective of what the syllabus sets out. To avoid distortion within and across subjects, assessment needs to cover all the broad targets of learning. This will require a blend of internal assessments made by teachers and external examinations since some important learning outcomes can only be assessed internally by teachers over time, eg. the capacity to carry out a project.

5.3.11 While it is necessary to ensure that the effect of assessment on teaching and learning is a healthy one, it is also necessary to ensure that it is not given too important a place in the curriculum. Overassessment has a negative effect on teaching and learning. It means that teachers devote less time to preparation of lessons and teaching and more to marking and assessing. Overassessment may also have a negative effect on the attitude of students, if they are too frequently pressured into preparing for tests.

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5.3.12 Assessment based on norm-referencing principles in which students are placed in rank order, and sometimes allocated to grades or percentiles reflecting the normal distribution curve, may foster motivation among those who are in the upper part of the rank order or in "pass" grades, but may have a negative motivational effect upon those lower down or in the "fail" grades. Slower learners find themselves in the lower grades consistently from year to year, irrespective of the progress they may have made. This may lead to self-image and disciplinary problems. We believe that the alternative form of assessment based on criterion-referencing principles, in which students are assessed not against one another but against targets at progressive levels, provides a means of assessment in which all students can be more readily motivated to progress through the levels at their own best speed. Each level of attainment can be viewed positively as a step in the right direction towards the next level.

Although it is inevitable that students will compare themselves with others, and that those who have not yet achieved as high a level of attainment as others will be able to see this quite clearly, nothing prevents them from progressing to the highest level that they can achieve in the time available. The achievement of success at one level motivates the student to wish to progress to the next. In brief, we believe that an assessment framework should work in favour of student motivation rather than against it.

5.3.13 We consider that it is as important to involve teachers in assessment as it is to involve them in other aspects of the curriculum. Teachers involved in creating schemes of work, choosing and creating materials, determining teaching methods and assessment, will not only grow in professional competence, but will be more committed to what is being done than if they were simply carrying out the plans of others. To summarise, we believe that school assessment should aim to respond to the range of informational demands of users and at the same time have a healthy and not a distorting effect on teaching and learning.

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