EXPLORING PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS' CONCEPTIONS OF ASSESSMENT IN TURKISH CONTEXT

Assessment plays crucial roles in educational process, and assessment results are seen as one of the best predictors of success or failure of the teaching-learning process. However, teachers’ or teacher candidates’ conceptions of conducting assessment have been mostly overlooked so far. To this end, the present study seeks to reveal the prospective teachers’ conceptions of assessment. It also seeks to show the effect of individual differences (e.g. grade), and tries to indicate any relationships among different purposes of conducting assessment. 204 prospective teachers participated in the study. Descriptive statistics indicated that improvement conception had the highest value, whereas conception of irrelevance had the lowest. Correlation results indicated that improvement, school accountability and student accountability conceptions were positively and strongly correlated with each other. On the other hand, there was a negative correlation between improvement and irrelevance conceptions. A multivariate test of variance (MANOVA) was utilized to examine any effects of individual differences on participants’ conception of assessment. MANOVA results indicated that even if there were differences in descriptive results for each variable, grade level is the only independent variables making statistically significant difference on participants’ conception of assessment. However, a follow-up Bonferroni adjustment presented no significance difference when the grades considered separately.