A Study On Science Teachers' Conceptions Of Assessment Of Students' Academic Performance

This paper is a positive research on science teachers' conceptions of assessment on students' academic performance. The content of the research includes three parts:①research on teachers' conceptions of assessment on students' academic performance.②research on teachers' approach to teaching. And③research on the relationship between teachers' conceptions of assessment and their approach to teaching. The first part will adopt both qualitative and quantitative methods. Concretely speaking, this part will employ the method of "Phenomenography" to investigate assessment ideas of 16 physics teachers from 4 schools in Nanhai Distrct of Foshan City, Guangdong Province. The results of the interview data analysis will be used as the bases of a theoretical model of science teachers' conceptions of assessment on students' academic performance. At the same time, the typical answers from the interviewees will help the design of science teachers' conceptions of assessment questionnaire. The quantitative method of research on teachers' conceptions of assessment will mainly adopt the method of investigation with research instrument of science teachers' conceptions of assessment questionnaire which is self-compiled. The second part of the research, a positive study on teachers' approaches to teaching, will use quantitative method. The research instrument used in this part will be the "Approaches to Teaching Inventory" which was corporately compiled by Professor Trigwell and Professor Prosser from Australia. The third part of this research, examining the relationship between teachers' conceptions of assessment and their approaches to teaching, will also use the quantitative method. The paper consists of four parts. The first part is about the background of the research which includes introduction and literature review. It will focus on the introduction to the significance of research theme selection, research design, previous research results and a kind of qualitative methodology—phenomenography. The second part is about research method which includes the design of the research, the concrete qualitative and quantitative method. In detail, this part will introduce some information about the research samples, research questions, research procedure and research stages, and the method of collecting and analyzing research data, the method of compiling and testing questionnaires, and the method of statistically dealing with the quantitative data. The third part is the results of the research. It also includes three parts:①qualitative results of the teachers' conceptions of assessment on students' academic performance, presented in a form of categories of teachers' conceptions of assessment;②quantitative results of the teachers' conceptions of assessment on students' academic performance, presented in a form of quantitative data of teachers' conceptions of assessment on every dimensions;③quantitative data of teachers' appi'oaches to teaching and results of the correlation analysis between the teachers' conceptions of ssessment and teachers' approaches to teaching. The fourth part is conclusion and discussion, which is mainly about the review of research results and its implications of methodology, the discussion of research validity, the ethic problems, the limitations of the research and the issues for further studies.