Teachers have had to face a number of difficulties when school-based assessment (SBA) was introduced for most subjects of the New Secondary School curriculum in Hong Kong from 2009. This paper draws on data from a project that supports the implementation of rubrics in inquiry learning for the subject of Liberal Studies. It aims at studying the way the use of rubrics enables teachers to address the challenges of SBA and at identifying useful strategies to address these challenges. The project invited ten secondary schools in which thirty-six teachers and more than 400 students were involved. Data were collected from teachers, students and classroom observations. The paper formulates four strategies by which rubrics are used to enhance the implementation of SBA, namely increasing the validity of assessment, diagnosing students’ learning needs, providing a supportive and non-competitive assessment environment, and enabling students to develop a personal learning path.
[Copyright © 2010 James Nicholas Publishers.]

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].

The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) was used to explore the Hong Kong teachers' intentions to implement school-based assessment (SBA) and the predictors of those intentions. A total of 280 teachers from Hong Kong secondary schools who had been involved in SBA were surveyed. Rasch-calibrated teacher measures were calculated for each of the 6 variables – affective and instrumental attitude, subjective norm, self-efficacy, knowledge, and intention – regarding SBA. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that instrumental attitude and self-efficacy made significant contributions to predicting intentions to implement SBA. These 2 predictors explained 55.2% of the variance in intentions. The other 3 variables, that is, affective attitude, subject norm, and knowledge, did not have significant predictive power on the formation of intentions to implement SBA. Possible explanations and implications of the findings are discussed.
[Copyright © Routledge].

School-based Assessment (SBA) in English Language is a new core component recently included in the Hong Kong university entrance public examination. It goes together with the promotion of an assessment for learning culture, in which enhancing students' learning is the major concern. This initiative marks an important and ambitious change in examination policy and school practice. Besides its assessment function, feedback forms a prominent tool in facilitating student progress in learning. It is important to understand students' perspectives towards feedback as students' ability to learn from feedback relates to their capacity to make sense of and apply feedback to further their learning. This study looks at students' perceptions of feedback in SBA and whether students react to feedback as a means to 'feed-forward'. The data were gathered from forty-five Form 5 (Grade 11) students in 3 schools through student focus groups and semi-structured interview with teachers. Findings suggest that students did not react in the same way to assessment feedback. Not all students had the strategies to effectively collect, organize and use feedback. The findings suggest that it is through mutual construction of achievement and improvement that students can become active participants in the process of classroom assessment and feedback.
[Copyright © Malaysian English Language Teaching Association (MELTA)].