Symposium: Assessment for Learning (AfL) in East Asia and Singapore Context: Perceptions, Policies and Practices

Assessment for Learning (AfL) has significant influence on select East Asian educational policy and planning initiatives. Scores on international tests demonstrate the high achievement of students from countries such as China, Japan and Singapore. Maintaining this achievement is increasingly understood as having to share spaces with assessment that builds learner capacity. High stakes assessment environments as exemplified in the Singaporean secondary school contexts are potential sites of complex assessment negotiation of priorities, understandings and enactments of AfL. Investigating these complexities demands an approach that is itself systemic, accounting for how assessment arises from the interaction of policies, perceptions and practices within a larger, layered system of education and society. Studying how assessment change as a means to higher or deeper achievement must therefore take into account these complexities.  The aim of the proposed symposium is to discuss a set of findings from related studies, that shed systematic understanding of AfL in specifically the Singapore secondary school contexts. This will be accomplished through meeting the following objectives: 
(i) To explain relationships among AfL policies, perceptions, practices and contexts.
(ii) to present analytical findings and models that may inform theoretical and practical understandings of AfL in the Singapore secondary in relation to its regional contexts.
The ways in which AfL is perceived, practiced and codified through policy warrant great attention. Equally important is an examination of how each of these areas relate to each other, and the contexts in which they function. The findings from the related papers are intended to illuminate indigenous models of AfL that may inform inquiry into further up-scaling of AfL work in Singapore school contexts and in the region.  This provides an entry point for policy recommendations, professional development, and meaningful research results that reflect and account for the complexities of theory of actions of AfL in specific context of a region and country. 
 
Assessment for Learning Research in East Asian Countries 
Wei Shin Leong & Haslinda Binte Ismail 
In East Asia, educational agencies have heeded the advice of research findings and acknowledge the value of Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices through policy initiatives. At definitional level, the multiple evolving conceptions and theories of what constitute AfL have consistently streamed in from overwhelmingly European and Anglophone-based research. The implementation of AfL in East Asian classrooms may therefore encounter barriers such as deeply rooted learning traditions that conflict with current mainstream AfL methodology and an unfamiliarity with or distrust of specific AfL practices. This paper presents the findings of a literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles from mainly ISI-indexed journals, on select AfL research in East Asian countries. From the findings of the articles, the current implicit and atheoretical approach towards defining and implementation of AfL, suggests opportunities for further deliberation and theorisation about what constitutes AfL in East Asian countries. It is conceivable that teachers who understand the principles and prepares students for summative assessment frequently in the East Asian classroom is concurrently practising AfL. Specifically from a policy evaluation viewpoint, further research is critical to affirm the wider strategy of certain East Asian countries of first developing a rigorous summative assessment system that minimises negative backwash effects of learning. We conclude that the practices of AfL can therefore not just be variable; they will be very situated and contested particularly if we are oriented to a social-cultural and situated theories of learning.   
 
Situating Assessment for Learning (AfL) in Singaporean Classrooms 
Hui Yong Tay, Wei Shin Leong, Christopher Deneen, Kelvin Tan, Karen Lam & Haslinda Ismail 
Paper two presents the quantitative and qualitative findings of a two-phase large-scale mixed methods study that involved teachers and administrators from 13 and 7 secondary schools (respectively). In phase one, the data gathered from a questionnaire on their views of assessment purposes, value, practice and perceived proficiency of AfL showed that generally, teacher respondents value AfL much more than they can practice or be proficient at it, particularly in aspects of peer and self-assessment as well as using assessment as a motivating experience for students. In contrast, they valued grading and reporting the least among AfL practices, they have to practice it most frequently and rate it highest in terms of their proficiency. In phase two, interviews, focused group discussions and lesson observations were carried out in seven of the 13 schools who participated in phase one, spanning one year of data collection and analysis. Based on the current coding and thematic formation protocol, there are different mediating influences involve in the way school leaders, teachers and students negotiate and find ‘good’ solutions to the tensions of assessment in general. Overall there are two approaches of how AfL practices are situated in Singaporean secondary classrooms. In one approach, the mediating influences give rise to an AfL that tries to synthesize learning and good performance tightly through test/examination preparation. In another approach, the mediating influences tend to widen the distance between learning and the performativity agenda. For instance teachers attempt to introduce broader strategies or tools in class pervasively that clarifies learning goals/intentions, though noting that ultimately examination matters. Implications on long term student learning and complexity of ‘joyful learning’ are discussed.