What teachers assess and its consequences

Students’ final marks consisted of cognitive achievement as well as non-cognitive criteria

Teachers’ cognitive criteria were mainly comprised of basic facts, recall and recognition. Certainly, achievement requires knowledge of important facts and concepts. However, for this knowledge to be usable, pieces of information need to be interrelated conceptually (Ausubel, 1968).

Learning science is a process of building a knowledge structure. Assessing such structural aspects of knowledge through tests and short answer exams seems difficult because these assessments cannot show how key concepts are mentally organized by a student. A picture of the "cognitive structure" of the student is needed, and to see this picture, teachers need more than tests. Student explanations, for example, can be used. Asking students to explain a situation in their own words may reveal what students know as well as how they connect concepts in their knowledge structure and use the information to find solutions to problems.

In addition, students develop skills that are assessed, and we cannot expect students to engage in higher-order thinking skills unless this is demanded by the assessments. The assessments that teachers reported in the present study may produce students who have factual knowledge but may not foster individuals who reason, think and solve problems. Hence, assessment in schools should target the valued outcomes of science learning and teaching in today's world, which place greater emphasis on the students' ability to inquire, reason scientifically, apply scientific concepts to real-world situations, and communicate. Students need to think, reason, and draw conclusions rather than trying to understand the conclusions that teachers draw for them.

The official assessment policy in Turkey also emphasizes the development and assessment of students’ higher-order thinking skills. However, data from this study shows that this is an unrealistic expectation, at least from the teachers’ point of view, because their pedagogies are not supportive to the development of these skills.

There need to be different types of assessments for different styles of teaching and learning. The teachers’ views about learning seemed to reflect their approaches to assessment. From the data, it was clear is that the behaviorist approach underlined the teachers’ perceptions of teaching and learning. Specifically, they viewed teaching as telling and learning as remembering. However, this approach is not compatible with current theories of learning and assessment or with the policies that Turkish policy makers are trying to establish.

Students’ effort and interest in the lessons and their approved and disapproved behaviors were also assessed to control students’ study behaviors or make them study during the term and to be fair at the end of the term. Thus, students’ end-of-term marks may contain criteria that are not related to biology knowledge. In other words, students who are well-behaved, attentive and diligent are given extra marks. In the present study, the teachers’ emphasis on favoring students who listened to the teacher during the lessons and seemed interested resulted in a tendency to assign passing grades to students even though their written exam results were not good enough.

Consequently, in view of these findings and data from previous studies, I recommend training teachers in assessment through in-service and pre-service courses. Furthermore, using assessments effectively for formative purposes should be a priority.

There were discrepancies between what teachers said they assessed and what they actually assessed.

The results of this study showed that there was misalignment between what teachers said they assessed and what they actually assessed. During the interviews, all but two of the teachers indicated that they expected students to learn meaningfully and did not accept assessing memorization, yet memorization questions appeared on their tests, and their comments during the interviews pointed out that they mainly assessed recall and memorization abilities. Thus teachers could not accurately judge the cognitive complexity of the questions that they asked in assessments.

The analysis of the examination papers provided tangible evidence of this result. Over 67% of the questions asked were knowledge-level questions, requiring recall and recognition, and only approximately 15% were application- and analysis-level questions. There were no synthesis- or evaluation-level questions. Because assessments demanded mostly recall and recognition, it is not realistic to expect students to develop more sophisticated study skills or engage in higher-order thinking.

During the interviews, the teachers also indicated that while teaching a particular concept, they warned students that that particular concept might appear on the exam. The practice of providing students with exact replicas of items that appear on the exam or giving students an answer that they can simply memorize for the exam sends a message to the students that this is what is important to learn and, as a result, learning becomes memorizing or recall, making the schooling all about grades and passing exams.

Thus, there is a need to plan and conduct effective professional development initiatives, including both pre- and in-service training, to transform teachers’ epistemologies in line with the current theories of teaching, learning and assessment. Unless teachers’ underlying assumptions are assessed and refocused, their instructional and assessment practices cannot be transformed.

Teachers’ expectations of students changed based on the perceived level of student ability.

During the interviews, conversations about students’ learning frequently resulted in a statement of frustration about students, referring their lack of ability or lack of interest. This frustration had important implications on what teachers assessed.

An important finding of the study is that teachers avoided exam questions that required higher-order thinking skills, based on a perception that their students would be unsuccessful. Thus, if students were perceived as having low abilities or being unable to cope with the demands of a particular task, teachers avoided such tasks, and the students were left unchallenged. Hence, a perception of a lack of skill or ability resulted in avoiding challenging tasks rather than taking responsibility to improve that skill.

The teachers’ perceptions of the students’ abilities not only limited their practice to focusing on low-level skills, such as recall versus recognition items in their written exams, but also might result in students developing these skills and adopting a learning strategy based on rote learning. As indicated earlier, there is empirical evidence suggesting that students study in the way that they think they will be tested (McKeachie, 1986; Crooks 1988). If students expect an exam focused on facts, they will memorize details. However, if they expect a test that will require problem solving or integrating knowledge, they will work toward understanding and applying information.

Hence, teachers’ expectations of students may affect student outcomes (Good and Brophy, 1987). Positive teacher expectations are recognized as a key variable that separate teachers who produce good achievement gains from those who do not (Rowntree, 1987; Imants and DeBrabander, 1996). It is important that teachers believe that every student can learn and that they appreciate their different learning needs and consider this in their teaching and assessment (i.e. the alternative assessment movement).