What teachers think about assessment and how it influences their classroom-based assessment practices – the results of a global survey

This paper explores language teacher cognition and assessment. We investigated teachers’ attitudes to assessment and how assessment influences their classroom based assessment practices. We engaged with teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) from around the world through an online questionnaire and follow-up interviews. The impetus for the project described in this paper was the puzzling results of a previous project (Berry, Sheehan and Munro, 2019) which had focused on Language Assessment Literacy (LAL). We conducted a series of classroom observations which focused on classroom-based assessment practices. We observed the teachers successfully deploying a range of assessment techniques in the classroom. When taking part in post-observation interviews those teachers all talked negatively about assessment and considered the observed assessment activities to be part of their teaching practices. This led us to consider that the teachers had a fundamentally different understanding of assessment than the one we had developed through our reading of the LAL literature. We started to wonder if exploring the issue of assessment through the prism of teacher cognition would improve our understanding of classroom-based assessment practices.