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].

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].

In Hong Kong, despite the officials' efforts to reform the school curriculum, studies have found that implementation of the proposed changes has been superficial (Yeung, 2006, 2009). Recently, evidence-based school self-evaluation has become a global trend in the school improvement movement. The Education Bureau in Hong Kong has followed this trend and launched a school evaluation policy — School Self Evaluation (SSE) and External School Review (ESR). The pair of evaluation measures was initiated to help schools to evaluate their own effectiveness, to ensure public accountability and to achieve self development (Quality Assurance Division, 2006). This paper shares the findings from a local research, which looks into the perception of the policy by school curriculum leaders and its possible impact on the school curriculum and teachers. The curriculum leaders described both positive and negative effects, potential threats and weaknesses of the school evaluation policy. Specific attention was given to how effective school evaluation in effect makes curriculum reform mandatory. Findings show how the local school curriculum can be controlled by bureaucratic preferences through SSE and ESR, and ultimately lost its ability to deal with diversity. It also shows how such forces impede teachers' professional autonomy and liberty.
[Copyright © Hong Kong Educational Research Association ].

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)].

Reform initiative towards assessment for learning is a response to a number of developments both in the region and internationally. Teachers play a critical role in the success of its implementation. This study aimed to explore teachers’ attitudes towards the costs and benefits of using reports generated from Rasch measurement to support assessment for learning. The participants were 25 primary school teachers and 24 secondary school teachers. Focus-group interviews were used to collect data on their attitudes towards Rasch measurement. ‘Big ideas’ (Krueger, Analyzing & reporting focus group results. Focus group kit 6. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998) were identified from the transcripts as a whole. They were then encoded with key phrases and sorted into categories. This study found that Hong Kong teachers in general welcomed Rasch measurement as a powerful alternative to traditional total score method for providing useful and detailed feedback to support and improve student learning, although some of them might be deterred by the contextual and technical problems.