Work

Parents’ beliefs about assessment: A conceptual framework and findings from Finnish basic education

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: The viewpoint of parents has been scarcely studied in classroom assessment research. We address this research gap by examining parents’ beliefs about assessment in the context of Finnish basic education (grades 1–9). A socioculturally oriented framework is developed to study the beliefs of parents. With this newly formulated framework, we qualitatively analyse parents' open-ended responses based a large-scale questionnaire study (N = 622). Our findings show that in the low-stakes assessment culture of Finland, parents largely framed assessment through a pedagogical conception that reflects the learning purposes of assessment. A societal conception of assessment was also strongly present, as parents believed that assessment should produce numerical data for the purposes of measurement and comparison. As a major contribution of this study, a six-dimensional conceptual framework for analyzing parents’ beliefs about classroom assessment is formulated and tested.

Source: Studies In Educational Evaluation

DOI: 10.1016/j.stueduc.2021.101097

Authors: Juuso Henrik Nieminen, Päivi Atjonen, Ana Remesal

Institutions: University of Eastern Finland, Universitat de Barcelona

Language: English

Topic: Student Assessment and Feedback

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,120