Teachers’ Perceptions Regarding Multiple Assessment Paradigms in English Teaching and Its’ Influence on Learning Achievement of Secondary Class Students

Abstract

Teachers’ assessment practices are pre-dominated by their perceptions, beliefs and attitudes. Review of literature on assessment indicates five assessment paradigms in relation to aims of assessment in teaching. The present study discovers the English teachers’ paradigm preference of multiple assessments to explore the purposes of assessment of English teachers in searching most suitable assessment paradigm for improvement of students’ achievement scores in examinations. The participants of the study were 344 English teachers working in secondary level of federal and provincial schools in Pakistan. A five-point Likert scale based on 20 items was used for collecting the data of this study. The descriptive analysis revealed that teachers give the maximum importance to the communicative function of assessment. It was derived that English teachers’ first priority of using assessment was to inform which was followed by assessment for learning as their second priority, assessment as learning at the third grade, and assessment of learning at fourth level. The least importance teachers give is to assessment as instruction. The inferential analysis explored that gender of teachers has no effect in relation to their assessment approach except the approach assessment for learning that displays the significant difference of assessment for learning. Provincial and federal teachers showed the significant difference of all multiple assessment areas that suggested their diverse preference of all assessment areas. Teaching experience had insignificant impact upon four assessment dimensions except “assessment to inform” that suggested that teaching experience effects on communicative purpose of assessment. Students’ strength in class had a significant influence on assessments as learning, of learning, for learning and as instruction areas except assessment to inform dimension. On the whole, a positive and strong relationship was found between teachers’ assessment to inform paradigms and students’ grades in English in Board examinations but unfortunately, teachers in majority used to prefer this paradigm in their perceptions.