The Importance Of Assessment Literacy In Education

Assessment has always been the inseparable part of education. From first grade in primary school to higher levels of university education, students are regularly assessed by their teachers. The most used instrument for this aim has been tests. Marso and Pigge (1988) estimated that 54 teacher-made tests are used in a typical classroom per year. Therefore, that a typical teacher would spend between one-third and one-half of the class time on a kind of measurement activity is of no surprise (Stiggins, 1994). Assessment has a great and powerful effect on students learning as Scouller (1999) and many other scholars have repeatedly mentioned. Fullan (2001) defines assessment literacy as the teacher’s capacity to analyze the students’ performances

Teachers routinely try to apply new and improved approaches toward their assessment which would have more validity. Teachers’ use of different methods to assess their students’ performances is based on their beliefs about theories of language, teaching, learning and assessment. Therefore, giving a special attention to teachers’ beliefs in the way of their professional development would seem of great importance (Borko et al., 1997). As a result many researchers have emphasized the need for further exploration of the relation between teachers’ beliefs and their assessment practices (Adams & Hsu, 1998; Winterbottom et al., 2008). This study has tried to examine the conception of assessment among the university teachers of different fields in Sirjan, Iran using Teachers’ Conception of Assessment (TCoA) inventory by Brown (2002, 2006). It is hoped that having a thorough understanding of teachers beliefs of assessment, can be of great help to teacher trainers and curriculum designers in fostering the necessary changes in assessment beliefs and practices in already implemented assessment

Therefore, teachers should use different methods of assessing students to get a full idea of what they have learned and what their problems are. In addition, teachers can use the assessment results to evaluate and improve their own practice as well. By the students’ accountability, it is meant that students themselves are responsible for their own learning. “Thus student accountability is largely about high stakes consequences such as graduation or selection or being publicly reported on as earning a certain grade, level, or score” (Brown, 2002, p.41). As Musial et al. (2009) have suggested grading in this conception does not consider what students have achieved and how much they have progressed in a learning continuum, but it is just concerned with the students’ position in relation to other students of the same age. The teachers and school accountability means the use of assessment to see how well teachers or schools are doing in relation to the established standards. This conception can be two-folded as Brown (2002) mentions: “one rationale emphasizes demonstrating publicly that schools and teachers deliver quality instruction, and the second emphasizes improving the quality of instruction” (p. 33). This concept is referred to as the requirement of summative assessment. The last conception assessment as irrelevance as Brown (2008) states “assessment, usually understood