An introduction is presented which discusses various articles within the issue on topics including countries participating in large-scale assessments in education on education policy, Programme for International Student Assessment in Hong Kong, and development of regulatory interventions.

This paper reports a case study of four project schools in the primary school context of Hong Kong. It has investigated how teachers who were assigned subject panel head's and curriculum leader's roles perceived the student assessment reform and how they experimented with new assessment strategies in the school policy and classroom practice. The major focus of the paper lies on how these teacher leaders expressed their understanding of student assessment reform in classroom practice. The main discussion of findings shows the perception of these teacher leaders on student assessment reform, how they put their ideas of formative assessment into practice, and in addition, the challenges they faced in the reform process.
[Copyright © 2015 Illinois State University.]

促進學習的評估是香港教育局委托的小班教學研究顧問，劍橋大學Professor Galton提出的，六個提升小班教學效能的原則之一。工作坊目的包括：(一)透過活動，讓老師從做中體驗三種評估學習模式的分别：對學習的評估(Assessment of learning)、作為學習的評估(Assessment as learning)及促進學習的評估(Assessment for learning)。(二)分享中、英、數、常四科應用促進學習的評估的教學設計。(三)介绍適合人腦學習(Brain-based learning)的促進學習的評估教學活動。

Hong Kong has an assessment for learning policy and a cultural context that emphasizes examinations. In addition to associating student grading with improvement, important improvement-oriented conceptions have been identified among Hong Kong teachers and which were not fully instantiated in the original Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment (TCoA) inventory. An expanded Chinese-TCoA inventory was administered to in Chinese in both Hong Kong and southern China. The intended 6 construct structure was not supported. Exploratory factor analysis (MLE, oblimin rotation) identified 7 factors, which were further reduced to 3 major inter-correlated constructs (i.e., improvement, accountability, and irrelevance). Improvement and accountability were strongly inter-correlated (r=.80), while improvement had a weak negative correlation with irrelevance and accountability had a weak positive correlation with irrelevance. The model had 7 factors based on 33 items and acceptable fit (χ2=3856.97, df=426; χ2/df=9.05, p<.001; CFI=.85; RMSEA=.065; SRMR=.065; gamma=.90). Two group nested invariance testing (i.e., Hong Kong vs. southern China) showed that the model was statistically equivalent, except for item residuals (k=62; χ2=4612.89, df=891; χ2/df=5.18, p=.02; CFI=.83; RMSEA=.047; SRMR=.065; gamma=.94). Differences in mean scores between the two groups showed that Hong Kong teachers agreed more with the ideas of assessments helping student learning, being accurate, and being examinations; whereas southern China teachers agreed more that assessment was irrelevant. This study contributes to our understanding of how assessment is understood by teachers working within Chinese contexts.
[Copyright © 2010 The Authors.]

This presentation focuses attention on structural and conceptual changes at the policy and classroom levels in assessment in the 334 education reform. In policy terms, new approaches to assessment were designed to be more formative, criterion-referenced, school-based, and learning-oriented, as compared to summative, norm-referenced, and evaluative public examination in the colonial period. These changes in assessment take place against the backdrop of major structural reform of the Hong Kong education system and the associated curriculum reform. This presentation will report on how new assessment policies have been taken up and implemented by the profession, and what progress has been made in achieving reform objectives.

This study aims at examining how learner L2 oral performance may vary across two different task types in the current school-based assessment initiative being implemented across secondary schools in Hong Kong. The study is innovative in that the tasks in this study involve speaking in a high-stakes language assessment context but they also build on a regular reading and viewing programme integrated into the school curriculum. An in-depth analysis of learner oral linguistic performance on two different task types, i.e., group interaction and individual presentation, from 30 ESL secondary school students, was conducted using a wide range of linguistic measures of accuracy, fluency and complexity derived from previous L2 speaking studies. The analysis shows generally systematic variation in performance dimensions across the two task types, suggesting a trend in the direction of less accuracy, lower fluency and less complex language being associated with the group discussion task. In addition, differences on rater assessments also appeared in the same direction across the two tasks as those differences on the linguistic measures. The results of this study appear to offer little support to the existing categorization of interactive tasks producing greater L2 complexity and accuracy than non-interactive tasks. Implications of the results for both test task development and classroom task design are discussed.
[Copyright © Pergamon Press].