Yunshan Chair Professor Liying Cheng from Queen’s University gave a public talk at the Lecture Hall, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies on Dec 4th, 2013. The talk was titled as “Interface between Assessment and Teaching: Validation of Teachers’ Grading Decision-Making”. Before the talk, Professor Dong Yanping, the Deputy Director of theNationalKeyResearchCenterfor Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, introduced to the audience Professor Cheng and her academic life experiences.
In the following one hour and a half, Professor Cheng first recalled her previous research experiences to explain how she developed the passion for education and assessment. Teachers’ grading, as a tool to help students attend to learning goals and criteria, served a very good interface between education and assessment to be investigated. Teachers’ grading can be analyzed through four aspects, namely, event, instrument, process and decision, the last of which was the focus of her public talk.
For all its particularities (e.g. vulnerable to public questioning, variable due to multiple factors considered during the length of a course, used for decisions that have consequences), teachers’ grading aroused extensive interest among many researchers as early as the author of a book on grading published in 1913. Although it was advocated that teachers’ grading should only focus on academic achievement, around the world pervasive is the fact that teachers take into considerations the other factors. It is already known that the grades, assessment training given to teachers and the subjects have an impact on teachers’ grading. Nevertheless, teachers’ grading decision-making process and criteria need exploring so as to amplifier this phenomenon.
Then Professor Cheng introduced her research framework, questions and designs. By referring to Messick’s Unified Validity Framework, she intended to investigate the construct, the use and the consequences of teachers’ grading. Questionnaires were allocated to junior and senior high school teachers in a big school boarding inBeijing,Chinato track the potential relations between the construct and the factors of subjects, grades and assessment trainings. Using a MANOVA, it was indicated that junior high school teachers with assessment trainings tended to consider goal-referenced factors and used more project-based, performance-based and self-developed tasks. For the intended use and the expected consequences of the grading, teachers were asked to fill in an open-ended questionnaire in which three choices of grading on a specific context were provided for teachers to choose from and teachers had to give reasons for that. It was found that many non-achievement factors were identified by teachers, such as effort, participation, habit of learning, attitude and motivation, etc. It suggested that teachers focused more on the consequences of the grading rather than the meaning of it.
Professor Cheng’s talks aroused great interest of the audience, who discussed constructively over the issues of classroom assessment and research methodology.
