Teachers’ conceptions of assessment in Chinese contexts: A tripartite model of accountability, improvement, and irrelevance Gavin T.L. Brown a, *, Sammy K.F. Hui b , Flora W.M. Yu b , Kerry J. Kennedy b a The University of Auckland, New Zealand b The Hong Kong Institute of Education, China 1. Introduction Current educational policy reform movements attempt to reduce the negative consequences of highly selective educational assessments by placing a greater emphasis on using assessment to inform teaching and learning improvements through actively involving learners in guiding learning development (i.e., assessment for learning—Assessment Reform Group, 1999). Assessment for learning policy initiatives, while arising especially in England as a response to high-stakes national testing (Stobart, 2006), are being exported throughout the world, including Hong Kong (Berry & Adamson, 2011; Kennedy & Lee, 2008). The policy reform places much greater responsibility on the teacher to effectively and professionally use assessment information to modify teaching practice and provide corrective feedback to students who are expected to be actively engaged learners (Leahy, Lyon, Thompson, & Wiliam, 2005). This pressure requires that teachers understand the rationale for improvement-oriented assessment and have the knowledge, skills, and resources to put this policy reform into action. In societies with high-stakes, public examination systems that are used to select students for progressively reducing educational opportunities (e.g., China and Hong Kong—Kennedy, 2007), this policy may fail through lack of teacher cooperation, knowledge, or belief in the proposed new usage of assessment. Hence, it becomes critical, not just for the success of policy initiatives, but also for the development of pre-service and in-service teacher education, to understand how assessment is understood by teachers. International Journal of Educational Research 50 (2011) 307–320 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 9 September 2010 Received in revised form 20 September 2011 Accepted 10 October 2011 Available online 8 November 2011 Keywords: Beliefs Values Attitudes Teachers Educational assessment Confirmatory factor analysis Multi-group invariance testing Survey research A B S T R A C T The beliefs teachers have about assessment influence classroom practices and reflect cultural and societal differences. This paper reports the development of a new self-report inventory to examine beliefs teachers in Hong Kong and southern China contexts have about the nature and purpose of assessment. A statistically equivalent model for Hong Kong and southern China teachers had three factors (i.e., improvement, accountability, and irrelevance). The Chinese teachers very strongly associated accountability with improve- ment (r = .80). This is consistent with the Chinese tradition and policy of using examinations to drive teaching quality and student learning and as a force for merit based decisions. Small differences between the two groups of teachers are consistent with assessment policy differences in the two jurisdictions. ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +64 9 623 8899x48602. E-mail address: gt.brown@auckland.ac.nz (Gavin T.L. Brown). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect International Journal of Educational Research jo u r nal h o mep age: w ww.els evier.c o m/lo c ate/ijed ur es 0883-0355/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2011.10.003