Teacher Assessment Knowledge and Practice A Narrative Inquiry of a Chinese College EFL Teacher''s Experience TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC MỞ BÀI GIẢNG GIÁO TRÌNH

Teacher Assessment Knowledge and Practice: A Narrative Inquiry of a Chinese College EFL Teacher’s Experience YUETING XU Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Guangzhou, China YONGCAN LIU University of Exeter Exeter, England This article explores teachers’ assessment knowledge and practice through a narrative inquiry of a college EFL teacher, Betty (pseudonym), in the People’s Republic of China Drawing on Crites’ (1971) notions of sacred stories and secret stories in teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995), it examines Betty’s account of her experience of assessment reform This account comprises three stories involving her colleagues and students Following Connelly and Clandinin’s (2006) three strands of narrative inquiry, this article discusses three structural conditions of teacher knowledge, temporality, sociality, and place, and their effects on teachers’ knowledge construction of assessment We argue that teachers’ prior assessment experience will affect their current practices and future plans for assessment (temporality); power relationships in teachers’ workplace will greatly in uence their assessment decision-making (sociality); and the specific contexts in which assessment takes place will affect teachers’ sense of security and therefore the effectiveness of the assessment (place) The findings highlight the recognition of teachers’ agency in assessment practice, the importance of negotiation with teachers of the reform policies, and the urgent need for professional development S ince opening its door to the outside world in the late 1970s, China has made learning English a national priority (Lam, 2005) Since 2001, the starting age to learn English as a compulsory subject in school has been lowered to nine (Liu, 2007) As examinations enjoy a wide societal acceptance as a fair means of measurement for selection and promotion (Cheng & Qi, 2006), passing them has become one of the essential requirements for admission to a higher level of schooling (Cheng, 2008) At the tertiary level, in uential tests such as College English Test, Bands TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 43, No 3, September 2009 493 and (CET 4/6)1 are conventionally considered, if not officially required, as a prerequisite for graduation (Jin, 2004) These large-scale tests have been shown to produce a significant backwash effect on teaching, known as the “teaching-to-the-test” phenomenon (Tang & Biggs, 1996, p 163), which is widely regarded as undesirable in educational terms To avoid such negative effects, Chinese TESOL educators have begun seeking an alternative means of evaluation Formative assessment, or assessment for learning (Black & Wiliam, 1998), has been advanced because of its proven benefits in relation to student learning (Genesee & Upshur, 2001; Marsh, 2007; Sutton, 1992; Torrance & Pryor, 1998) The Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) has promulgated the use of formative assessment in the newly published curriculum framework of EFL teaching at the tertiary level, College English Curriculum Requirements (2004, 2007), in the hope that students can improve their learning based on teachers’ feedback in formative assessment and teachers can obtain useful information from students for better instructional planning The increased policy attention to formative assessment, however, does not ensure its effective implementation First, the existence of public assessment scales does not by itself ensure that teachers will use the knowledge assumed by the published assessment framework (Leung, 2004), implying an urgent need to understand teachers’ actual assessment criteria in practice When compared with the bulk of studies on student gain in relation to formative assessment, relatively little attention has been paid to teachers’ criteria and practice except in a handful of recent studies (Ash & Levitt, 2003; Graham, 2005; Leung, 2004; Leung & Mohan, 2004) Moreover, although it is generally believed that teachers need long-term professional development opportunities before they are competent to embed formative assessment effectively in their teaching (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & William, 2003; Shepard, 2000; Torrance & Pryor, 2001), formative assessment is not a major component of teacher education (Leung, 2004) In China, college EFL teachers receive little formative assessment training in their preservice bachelor’s or master’s degree programs2 and no assessment training after graduation In addition, the reciprocal relationship between teaching and assessment The CET is a large-scale standardized test administered nationwide by the National College English Testing Committee on the behalf of the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education in China It is intended to measure the language proficiency of non– English-major college students According to a survey conducted by Zhou (2005) among 1,200 EFL teachers in 49 different colleges, 56% of teachers hold a bachelor of arts degree, and 28% hold a master of arts degree The bachelor’s degree programs that prepare English teachers are mostly provided by English departments in teachers’ colleges, where most of the teacher training focuses on practical teaching (Wu, 2002) According to Wang (2003), most of the master’s degree programs of applied linguistics that prepare college EFL teachers in China generally provide one testing course, which has little to with formative assessment 494 TESOL QUARTERLY is not fully visible to teachers who tend to see assessment as an additional burden to teaching rather than an integral part of it (Heritage, 2007) In sum, the fact that “formative assessment is not well understood by teachers and is weak in practice” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p 20) makes it a daunting task to probe teachers’ knowledge, practice, and professional development in formative assessment TEACHERS’ KNOWLEDGE, PRACTICE, AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN ASSESSMENT A review of literature on language teachers’ classroom-based assessment3 suggests that relevant studies focus on the following three issues: teachers’ knowledge of assessment, assessment practices, and professional development in assessment Earlier research concerned with teachers’ knowledge of assessment has found that teachers are often torn between two icting beliefs: that assessment should be for the facilitation of learning or that assessment should be for reporting achievement (Brindley, 1989; Stiggins, 1999) More recent research shows that teachers not use externally prescribed standards only as a basis of their judgment; they also turn to their own implicit knowledge and beliefs, especially when icts arise between their personal assessment and standardized criteria (Arkoudis & O’Loughlin, 2004; Davison, 2004) By observing the ict between teachers’ own professional judgments of learner performance and the external standards they were required to meet, Davison (2004) posits that individual teachers may interpret rating rubrics differently on the basis of their different assessment beliefs With this understanding of the importance of teachers’ personalized judgment, researchers have further explored teachers’ assessment cognition as well as its sources For example, both Yin (2005) and Rea-Dickins (2007) examine teachers’ decision-making in assessment practice and trace the sources of such cognitive activities, which include teacher training, previous teaching experience, and professional contexts These studies reveal that the complexity of teacher knowledge needs to be further investigated in teachers’ assessment practice The second issue is centered on teachers’ assessment practice Compared with the extensive use of teacher assessment in classroom practice, relatively few studies empirically examine the assessment practices of TESOL educators and practitioners in schools (Cheng, Roger, & Hu, 2004; Clarke & Gipps, 2000) Among the limited number of studies that investigate teachers’ assessment practice, some have investigated teachers’ Classroom-based assessment is here used in a broad sense that includes all teacher assessment, irrespective of summative or formative purpose (Rea-Dickins, 2008) A CHINESE COLLEGE EFL TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 495 assessment practice in classroom settings and larger sociocultural contexts (Leung, 2004; McNamara, 2001; Rea-Dickins, 2008) McNamara points out that assessment is a social practice; by extension then, any research on teacher assessment needs to be conducted in classroom settings so as to understand the lived experiences of teachers and learners Arkoudis and O’Loughlin (2004) explore how teachers work with the state-mandated assessment policy within the local educational contexts, and they caution that teachers need to be fully aware of the social realities and power relations within the educational bureaucracy in which they work The interactive nature of formative assessment and the multiplicity of contexts in which it is situated have made its practice a complex issue The third issue is teacher development in assessment The complexity of teachers’ knowledge and the poverty of their practice in formative assessment both demonstrate the significance of teacher development in assessment There is growing evidence revealing a real need for building teacher capacity (Bachman, 2000) and developing new skills and abilities in teacher assessment (Edelenbos & Kubanek-German, 2004) It has been suggested that teacher capacity building includes not only teachers’ understanding of the language (Grierson, 1995), but also their understanding and practice of effective classroom assessment (Gardner & Rea-Dickins, 2001; Oliver, Haig, & Rochecouste, 2005) Both of the aforementioned multifaceted requirements of teacher assessment competence and recent ELT teacher education research (Freeman, 2002) indicate that teacher development in assessment cannot be achieved by teacher training alone Drawing on the evidence from two case studies, Ash and Levitt (2003) argue that formative assessment provides teachers with opportunities for professional growth as it involves both individual and mutual appropriation of learner products Likewise, Graham’s (2005) study discusses how preservice teachers benefit from classroombased assessment training and assessment-driven planning, and it also reports that professional dialogue about planning and assessment in campus classes and mentored field experiences in uences teacher growth in assessment In sum, teacher change in assessment practice, as Leung (2004) notes, is “often a very complex, different, highly personal and long-term process” (p 34) In reviewing these studies, we have reached the following conclusions about teachers’ knowledge, practice, and development in assessment First, the tension between teachers’ implicit knowledge of assessment and the prescribed standards calls for new methodology to address the uniqueness and individuality of teachers’ assessment practice Second, the salient issue of teachers’ actual practices in assessment and the limited understanding of such practices require further empirical research The interactive nature of teachers’ practice also highlights the importance of situating teachers’ assessment practice in larger sociocultural contexts 496 TESOL QUARTERLY Third, the complexities of teacher capacity building and the relatively slow and highly personal process of teacher change call for sustained efforts to promote teacher development in assessment Based on these conclusions from the literature, this article explores the knowledge and practice of teacher assessment through a narrative inquiry into the experience of a Chinese college EFL teacher, Betty,4 who was involved in an assessment reform program By investigating Betty’s stories of assessment and situating them in multiple contexts, the article attempts to make sense of Betty’s knowledge and practice of assessment and the effects of structural conditions on teacher knowledge construction The implications for teacher development in assessment are also highlighted THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: THE LANDSCAPES OF TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE One of the most powerful theories of teacher knowledge is that proposed by Connelly and Clandinin (1988, 1995) In contrast to the technical rationalistic approach to teacher knowledge, they contend that teacher knowledge is not something objective and independent of the teacher that may be learned and transmitted but is rather the sum total of the teacher’s experiences Following Elbaz’s (1983) notion of practical knowledge, which is oriented toward contexts, Connelly and Clandinin (1988) emphasize the personal aspect of teacher knowledge and refer to it as personal practical knowledge because it is derived from a person’s narratives and aimed at meeting the demands of a particular situation Adopting an experiential philosophical approach, Connelly and Clandinin further argue that teacher knowledge is “in the teacher’s past experience, in the teacher’s present mind and body, and in the future plans and actions” (p 25) Connelly and Clandinin’s sustained inquiries into the personal practical knowledge of teachers led them to consider how teachers’ personal practical knowledge shapes and is shaped by the environment in which they work To that end, they have developed the concept of teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995), which they describe as follows: A landscape metaphor allows us to talk about space, place, and time Furthermore, it has a sense of expansiveness and the possibility of being filled with diverse people, things and events in different relationships Because we see the professional knowledge landscape as composed of relationships among people, places, and things, we see it as both an intellectual and moral landscape (p 5) To protect the real identity of the EFL teacher, Betty, all personal names, and names of institutions are fictitious A CHINESE COLLEGE EFL TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 497 The professional knowledge landscape provides a way to contextualize teacher knowledge In addressing the question of how teacher knowledge is shaped by the professional knowledge context in which teachers work, Clandinin and Connelly (1996) borrow Crites’s (1971) terms sacred story and secret story to illustrate the epistemological dilemmas that teachers may face in their knowledge construction both in and out of the classroom According to Crites (1971), sacred stories emerge from the outof-classroom place where teachers are expected to as the imposed prescriptions instruct They are often other people’s visions of what is right for teachers and students; they may arise from researchers, policy makers, and administrators, in the form of theory, policy statements, and improvement schemes In contrast, when teachers move into their classrooms, they are “free from scrutiny” so that they “live stories of practice” (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996, p 25) The real story that is actually believed and acted on is a secret story Because sacred stories and secret stories are told by the authorities and teachers, respectively, they are analytically distinctive in conceptualizing teachers’ stories This article uses these two concepts as the main vehicle for analysis METHODOLOGY: NARRATIVE INQUIRY OF TEACHER KNOWLEDGE The investigation of Betty’s assessment knowledge and practice was conducted through a narrative inquiry Bruner (1990) has noted that human life is fundamentally narrative and stories are a common way of organizing knowledge The story is the basic means by which we understand the world and the closest way of making sense of our experiences Narrative inquiry, or the study of experience as story, is therefore “first and foremost a way of thinking about experience” (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p 375) In educational research, narrative has emerged as both a method in, and an object of, inquiry in teacher education, especially in descriptions and analyses of teacher knowledge (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Elbaz, 1983) Researchers of teacher education argue that teacher knowledge is largely structured through stories and that the story is epistemologically the most authentic way to understand teaching from the teacher’s point of view (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Lyons & LaBoskey, 2002) Through telling and retelling, living and reliving teachers’ own stories, teachers’ lived experiences, including their knowledge and practices in educational reforms, can be interpreted and understood narratively (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996; Craig, 2007; Tsui, 2007) 498 TESOL QUARTERLY Connelly and Clandinin (2006) identify three commonplaces of narrative inquiry: temporality, sociality, and place Together, these constitute a three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry Temporality refers to the temporal transition in which events and people exist It requires the narrative inquirer to consider an event, person, or object in relation to its past, present, and future Sociality encourages narrative inquirers to describe both the personal and social conditions of the person under study, whereas place requires them to attend to the specificity of location where events take place All three strands come into play in settings both in and out of the classroom In the current study, Betty’s assessment knowledge and practice are analyzed through a narrative inquiry based on the stories that she told There are three sets of data The first set includes two formal semistructured interviews, each of which lasted for about hours, and in which Betty shared with us her experiences of conducting assessment as well as what she found significant in her teaching and assessment practice The second set of data is derived from personal communications with Betty Before and after the interviews, we discussed her learning and teaching experiences in several personal conversations These discussions were used as input to formulate the interview questions and to develop a broad description of the contextual and personal contours of the EFL teacher The third set of data is Betty’s personal records, including her teaching evaluation sheets,5 teaching and assessment plans, and the notes she made in relation to her assessment practice and her students’ responses To allow Betty to better express herself, all interviews and conversations were conducted in Chinese The interviews were first transcribed verbatim and then translated into English.6 To make the teacher narratives more visible, the transcribed interviews were then rewritten in English as three condensed and coherent stories of Betty’s assessment practice (Søreide, 2006) To ensure that we had made no major changes in the content of the refined teacher narratives, we first compared them with the original transcripts and then sent them to Betty for her to verify the authenticity of the stories and to give consent for our use Because the narrative approach has an analytical interest in individuals and provides personal meanings in interpretation (Clandinin et al., 2006), we chose to use the case of a single teacher to illuminate the complexity of teachers’ assessment knowledge and practice The study does not aim to draw a universally applicable conclusion but rather to In Betty’s university, the teaching evaluation sheet is the electronic record of the students’ evaluation of the teacher in each semester It consists of the scores on each of the ten specific scales and students’ feedback of and comments on the teacher’s teaching It is accessible to the teacher when the semester is over To ensure its conformity to the Chinese version, the translation was given to two Chinese EFL teachers, colleagues of the authors, to read A CHINESE COLLEGE EFL TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 499 highlight the salient issues in implementing teacher assessment and encourage teachers to re ect on their assessment practices BETTY’S ASSESSMENT KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE The ELT Teaching and Assessment Reform Landscape As mentioned earlier, researchers have realized the negative backwash effects brought about by the predominance of summative assessment and, as a result, they have called for the use of formative assessment to adjust student learning (Genesee & Upshur, 2001; Wang & Fu, 2006) The School of English Education (SEE), the school in which Betty teaches, initiated a communicative language teaching reform with the assessment reform as a critical component in 2001 The assessment reform was implemented in all of the English courses at the university and was intended to transform the purpose of assessment from summative to formative For example, in the case of the Comprehensive English course, the assessment system has gone through significant changes since 2001, with the focus shifting from tests to regular informal assessment (see Table 1) As Table indicates, 2004 was a turning point for the assessment system For the first time, the assessment of daily performance was given more weight than exam results in the final evaluation Since then, the assessment of students’ daily performance has consisted of four parts—classroom participation, assignments, learning projects, and presentation—all of which aim to encourage students to learn English for use rather than for tests Teachers are required to implement this assessment plan as it has been prescribed in each course syllabus It is within this language assessment landscape that Betty’s lived experience of assessment was situated Betty’s Stories: A Diligent, Independent Student and a Critical, Well-Respected Teacher Betty was born in a small and poor village in southern China in the early 1980s While studying in the best middle school in town, Betty found TABLE The Evolution of the Assessment System in the Comprehensive English Course Academic year Mid-term score Final exam score Daily performance 2001–02 2002–03 2003–04 2004–09 40% 40% Canceled Canceled 50% 40% 60% 40% 10% 20% 40% 60% 500 TESOL QUARTERLY that she was good at scientific subjects; thus, she dreamed of being admitted to a key university as a science major However, as a result of the national entrance exams, against her wishes, she was enrolled as an English major at Shangda, a key university in northern China Betty soon found that among a group of highly proficient English learners, she was at a disadvantage with the limited English knowledge and heavily accented spoken English she had learned in her hometown Feeling pressured to catch up with her classmates, she worked very hard and made every effort to well in all kinds of examinations, which were the only means of assessment in her university By the time she graduated, Betty was admitted to the master of arts program without taking the entrance exams because of her outstanding academic record Her learning experiences as a graduate student were marked by much academic activity, many publications, and the development of her critical thinking skills Upon her graduation with master of arts degree from Shangda, Betty secured a teaching position in Tianda, a university in Guangdong Province with a good reputation for quality language learning and teaching Since her recruitment, she has been assigned to teach different courses to nonEnglish majors, including Comprehensive English, Writing, and Listening and Speaking She is popular among students and, as a result, her classroom evaluation score is one of the highest of all in the faculty Her popularity, however, is not achieved by being kind and lenient but by being strict and critical She seldom praises her students and is sparing with her positive feedback At first, many of her students felt frustrated and uncomfortable, but they soon found that they had learned a great deal and that their potential was developed with Betty’s constructive criticism As a result, Betty’s “critical” way of teaching has gradually been accepted, and she has become well respected by her students Recently, Betty’s students gave her a photo album as a present for Teachers’ Day, in which they expressed their gratitude and good wishes One of the students, however, wrote a list titled “What Betty Has Taught Us,” with one of the quotations re ecting Betty’s unwavering belief in assessment: “I don’t believe that the test-oriented education would produce ‘high-score–low-ability’ numbness as what the media advocates My experience told me that it did not bring about such numbness but ‘high-score-high-ability’ intelligence.” Betty’s three assessment stories outlined as follows correspond to three kinds of experience that she has had in assessment The first story tells how Betty used her self-developed “reward-or-punishment” strategy to assess student presentation The second story tells how she was pressed by her colleague to change the grades she assigned to the students The third story is about how she empowered her students to become self-assessors by giving them the right to self-assigned homework A CHINESE COLLEGE EFL TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 501 “Reward or Punishment”: Knowledge Construction With Self Classroom-based student presentation is one of the assessment activities in the Comprehensive English course that Betty teaches According to the course syllabus, teachers are supposed to award a general score worth 20% of the final grades, in addition to providing feedback to help improve student performance Betty mentioned repeatedly in the interviews that “I don’t trust formative assessment,” which intrigued and induced us to find out how a follower of nonformative assessment deals with a more formative kind of assessment Her reward-or-punishment assessment strategy provides the answer to our question I have an initial evaluation of students’ language competence based on their grades of quizzes, and rank them into different levels such as A, B, C, or D I remember a student whose name is Yao is about Level B according to her results of quizzes But the presentation she made was carefully designed and professionally presented, which far exceeded my expectation of her So I gave her positive feedback as one of the few exceptions in class, and awarded her presentation the grades of 19 out of 20, with points as a reward for her excellent performance On the contrary, I would decrease the student’s grades as a punishment if he or she failed to reach my expectation As the story shows, Betty would punish or reward her students by decreasing or increasing their grades on presentations, depending on whether the particular performance failed to reach or exceeded her expectation of the student based on their quiz results The quizzes are four language achievement tests, each of which is developed by her course group and conducted after each unit They are aimed at measuring students’ achievement in the particular unit and consist of three sections of multiple choice questions including vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension From Betty’s account, we knew that she had used this reward-or-punishment strategy for two consecutive semesters and found it effective to use the quiz grades as a frame of reference for her formative assessment practice She added that the quizzes had given her a quick estimation of a student’s language competence, which would assist her assessment of the student’s ongoing learning performances over the long term “Are Your Grades Too High?”: Knowledge Construction With Colleagues Betty’s reward-or-punishment strategy seems to re ect her independent decision making and her own knowledge construction in assessment 502 TESOL QUARTERLY The intervention of Betty’s colleague in her assessment practice, however, breaks this assumption The Comprehensive English course was taught by three teachers, Betty, Wind, and the course leader Jane The administration requires teachers to print out the assessment sheets with each assessment item specified and give them to the course leader for his or her approval at the end of the semester The following story took place when Betty was typing in the students’ grades in the office after she had finished marking students’ final exam papers Jane came in and asked me whether I had finished the overall evaluation I said, “I am doing it.” She then came over and leaned against my desk, peering at the Excel sheet on which I was typing the grades She then said in a low voice, “Are the grades you awarded too high? You see, you awarded or 10 out of 10 for the students’ classroom participation, but Wind and I assigned points on average.” At that moment, my understanding of her words was that the grades I awarded to my students would be unfair to her students Then I realized that she was hinting [for] me to lower the scores to keep a balance After she left, I pondered for a while in the office, and eventually decided to listen to her and lowered the grades by one or two points Betty was confronted with a dilemma She felt guilty that she didn’t award her students the grades she felt they deserved because of the pressure from her colleague At the same time, she seemed to have no alternative but to change the grades because a hint from the course leader equalled an indirect order and respect for her superior was highly valued Betty later mentioned that she was then very concerned about the possible consequences of not listening to Jane and potential failures in future cooperation at the workplace She was also concerned about whether such imposed pressure from above might be felt by other teachers as well “You May Decide Homework for Yourself”: Knowledge Construction With Students The two aforementioned stories summarize Betty’s re ections on her own assessment practice and her assessment interactions with her colleague, whereas the following story depicts how Betty interacts with her students by empowering them to be self-assessors The story took place when Betty’s students were going to take part in the CET4 Despite the decisive role that the CET4 certificate plays in academic records and future job-hunting, Betty’s faculty did not plan to devote many class hours to help students prepare for the test, unlike most universities in China However, the students expected Betty to help them with the CET4 preparation A CHINESE COLLEGE EFL TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 503 The students were to take part in the CET4 in the last spring semester Since there was no test preparation in class, I decided to prioritize it in their after-class assignments So I announced to them, “You are free to decide your homework within the scopes of vocabulary, reading entry and dictation.” Seeing their confusing faces, I continued to explain, “For example, you may set your goal of daily assignment as memorizing five new words, making one reading entry and completing one listening dictation You may adjust your goal in one or two weeks, yet you are supposed to stick to your plan once it is finalized.” Upon hearing this, they became very excited, discussing and cheering for the autonomy they had never before enjoyed In the following weeks, however, some students complained to me that they preferred my assignments rather than their own, though some others enjoyed doing the self-assigned homework I did not change my plan, and kept reminding them of sticking to a feasible plan At the end of the term, I asked them to self-assess their homework assignment, and I awarded them grades based on their self-assessment as well as how well they made and stuck to their plan Betty pointed out that self-assigned homework within the scope of test preparation was a compromise she made between the assessment requirements of the faculty and the test preparation needs of her students By doing so, she aimed to help her students keep track of their own progress, which would enhance their self-assessment skills and learner autonomy She then spoke of her learning experiences as the main source of such an attempt She reiterated that being able to self-assess one’s own learning was the first step to becoming an autonomous learner, which, she believed, was one of the most important things to be learned in college DISCUSSION These three stories about Betty’s assessment experience show that she constructed her knowledge of assessment by herself and with her colleague and her students The stories, as Clandinin and Connelly (1996) note, can be understood narratively in terms of sacred and secret stories The authority tells sacred stories whereas teachers live their own secret stories Because a professional knowledge landscape helps contextualize teachers’ personal practical knowledge, it provides a three-dimensional space of temporality, sociality, and place where teachers’ stories unfold and their personal practical knowledge is situated (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006) Sacred Story and Secret Story: Betty’s Assessment Experiences Sacred stories represent the you should type of knowledge prescribed by the authority, whereas secret stories stand for teachers’ I should knowledge that is embedded in their actual practices In Story 1, the 504 TESOL QUARTERLY sacred story was that Betty should assess students’ presentations on the basis of the rubrics and assign them the grades that they deserve The secret story that Betty lived, however, was the reward-or-punishment assessment strategy she adopted in the presentation assessment Similarly, in Story Betty was expected to make independent assessment decisions according to the sacred story The secret story, however, was that she was deprived of her independence in making assessment decisions by her colleague’s intervention and her own culturally mediated responses to it Likewise, in Story 3, Betty lived her secret story of empowering her students to assign themselves homework, though the sacred story required her to take charge of student assessment From this analysis, we can see that Betty believes (a) formative assessment is not antagonistic to summative assessment in that there is an internal connection between the two; (b) teachers are able to assess student performance independently, and such independence should be free from external intervention; (c) one of the objectives of formative assessment is to empower students to be self-assessors However, Betty’s assessment practice is not always consistent with her knowledge In Stories and 3, she practiced her knowledge; that is, she used the quiz results as a basis for her formative assessment and empowered her students to assign themselves homework In Story 2, however, Betty was pressed to lower students’ grades, which does not conform to her knowledge of independent assessment In the following section, we use Betty’s stories to discuss how temporality, sociality, and place (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006) shape teacher assessment knowledge Temporality: Past, Present, and Future Temporality refers to the temporal conditions in which people and events are situated As noted by Connelly and Clandinin (1988), teachers’ personal practical knowledge is the total sum of their experience In this sense, teachers’ past experience, present actions, and future plans all constitute the bulk of teacher knowledge; thus, it cannot be discussed independent of time Most of the assessment forms that Betty embraced in her undergraduate and graduate programs were tests, and her rich test-taking experience cemented her trust in summative assessment Consequently, she firmly believes that tests can best assess students’ language competence As shown in Story 1, Betty turns to her experiences of summative assessment and bases her evaluation on test results when assessing student presentations In other words, her prior learning experiences determine her knowledge of practice Moreover, teachers’ memories of their learning experiences also have an impact on their expectations for their students (Feiman-Nemser & A CHINESE COLLEGE EFL TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 505 Buchmann, 1986; Grossman, 1990) As Betty’s learning biography suggests, she achieved her academic success mainly through independent learning For example, after enrolling in her bachelor of arts in English program, Betty realized that she was not bound for success in her major, and she made a concerted effort to catch up with her classmates Her successful experiences of independent learning have subsequently shaped her expectations of her students’ ability to achieve academic success by the same means Hence, she requires her students to assign themselves homework, though she does not include this activity in the course syllabus Such an activity empowers students to become selfassessors and thereby promotes learners’ autonomy On the temporal continuum, Betty’s present knowledge and practice give rise to her future actions, which seem predictable According to Betty’s present knowledge of assessment, it is possible that she will apply her rewardor-punishment strategy and even extend its use in her practice, if it continues to prove effective Likewise, Betty will empower students to be self-assessors in her future assessment practice when it proves successful Put simply, the interplay of teachers’ past experience and present actions informs their present knowledge, which consequently determines their future plans In brief, the continuity of teachers’ experiences testifies that temporality is an essential structural condition of teacher knowledge in assessment Sociality: Power Relations Sociality refers to both personal conditions, which indicate the feelings, attitudes, and moral dispositions of a person toward events, and social conditions, which include the context of administration, policy, and community (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) Teachers’ sociality is also embedded in a specific school context that is itself situated in larger sociocultural contexts When she was pressured to lower the grades, Betty was confronted with a dilemma On one hand, she is a teacher-assessor who is to make assessment decisions independently in a school context, but on the other hand, she is a young teacher in a subordinate position who is to listen to her course leader She had to sacrifice either her independent decisionmaking in assessment or her harmonious relation with Jane In Chinese culture, where hierarchy is so deeply rooted and submission and subordination of the young to the elderly and of the inferior to their superiors are highly valued (Gao & Ting-Toomey, 1998; Zhai, 2004), Betty eventually chose not to damage her social relationships Clearly, the unequal power relation hindered Betty from seeking professional dialogue with Jane The dilemma that Betty encountered is endemic in other teachers’ classrooms in China; the ict she 506 TESOL QUARTERLY experienced is a critical opportunity for her and other teachers like her to learn how to negotiate with people in power-laden social contexts In this sense, the disagreement between Betty and Jane would have been useful if they had exchanged professional advice Therefore, Betty’s assessment decision is not so much a pedagogical as a social practice “grounded in complexity and ict” (Davison, 2004, p 326) The interactive nature and context-dependent process of formative assessment demonstrate that sociality (power relations) is an important dimension of teacher knowledge of assessment Place: Inside and Outside the Classroom Place is a self-explanatory concept referring to the concrete physical location where an event happens Following Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) notion that narrative inquiry is bound by place, we propose the notion that place is also a structural condition of teacher knowledge As the framework of professional knowledge landscape suggests (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996), teachers work in two main places in the landscape, one in the classroom and the other in communal settings outside the classroom Classrooms are safe places for teachers because they are almost always “free from scrutiny” (p 25) There, they can freely live and tell their secret stories Places outside the classroom, however, are filled with prescribed knowledge, and teachers have to live stories that align with the sacred stories Similarly, Betty lived different stories as she moved in and out of the classroom The prescribed rules and policy that required her to assess student presentation independently according to the rating rubrics emanated from outside the classroom When she was in the classroom, however, she lived and told her secret stories as she used her self-developed reward-or-punishment strategy and empowered her students to be selfassessors Clearly enough, one of the important factors that prompted Betty to put aside the sacred stories in which she did not believe was the specific location of the events—a classroom that is free from scrutiny In other words, Betty was able to author her stories in the classroom, whereas such authorship would be risky outside the classroom For example, although she agreed with the sacred story that teachers should work as independent assessors, Betty allowed herself to be pressed by her colleague into lowering students’ grades in the office The free, secret, and personal nature of the classroom seems to provide teachers with a sheltered space where they can draw on their personal practical knowledge and make independent decisions Although Connelly and Clandinin (1995) caution that this secrecy should not be glorified, they also point out that it plays an important role in shaping the epistemological nature of classrooms in A CHINESE COLLEGE EFL TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 507 which teachers feel secure In other communal places in the landscape, teachers dare not or are unable to draw on personal practical knowledge and make independent decisions because the imposed prescriptions which are often applied to practice without prior negotiation with teachers ict with their personal practical knowledge and make them feel less secure The sense of security found in classrooms proves that place is a structural condition of teacher knowledge in assessment CONCLUSION This narrative inquiry into Betty’s experiences of assessment reveals that teacher knowledge is not a static end product, but a highly complex, dynamic, and ongoing process Within Clandinin and Connelly’s (1996) framework of professional knowledge landscapes, we make sense of the three stories of Betty’s assessment experiences in light of the sacred story prescribed by the authority and the self-re exive secret story lived and told by Betty On the basis of Connelly and Clandinin’s (2006) three strands of narrative inquiry, we argue that temporality, sociality, and place are three structural conditions that shape teacher knowledge We contend that teachers’ knowledge of assessment develops on a temporal continuum in the sense that teachers usually draw on their prior assessment experience to inform their current practice of assessment, which further informs their future plans (temporality) Moreover, teachers’ decisionmaking and actual practice of assessment are mediated by the powerladen relationship in the interpersonal landscape (sociality) Whether teachers’ knowledge is facilitated or inhibited depends largely on the particularity of the location where the practice of assessment is situated, because teachers’ sense of security can be heavily in uenced by the specific location (place) The study further reveals the complexity of the three structural conditions and their effects on the construction of teachers’ knowledge (See Figure 1) Discussions of the structural conditions of teacher knowledge provide a new perspective in understanding many issues that have been long discussed in formative assessment research As the structural conditions suggest, teachers’ prior experience of assessment, power-laden relationships, and specific locations all play a critical part in teachers’ knowledge construction of formative assessment Following this line, teachers’ assessment practice is by no means uniform, standardized, and consistent Instead, it consists of discrepancies, uncertainty, and instability, which suggests that the standardization of teacher assessment instruments is not a straightforward matter As Leung and Mohan (2004) note, teacherbased assessment does not easily fit into the conventional standardized assessment paradigm It needs to be studied in depth and reconceptualized, with teachers’ roles being redefined and practices reinterpreted 508 TESOL QUARTERLY FIGURE Three Structural Conditions of Teacher Knowledge and Their Effects on Teachers’ Knowledge Construction Moreover, the interactive and context-dependent nature of teacher-based assessment suggests that teachers need space and resources to develop their own interpretations and adjustments of rubrics according to their students’ learning, even though a common understanding has been considered a prerequisite for valid assessment This finding again indicates the importance of teacher autonomy in assessment The more autonomy teachers are entitled to, the more risks they take in their assessment practice, which in turn enhances their ownership of knowledge Understanding these structural conditions suggest three changes to teacher development in assessment First, teachers’ agency in assessment should be more fully recognized via mediation of individual and social contexts In other words, policies, research findings, and plans should be negotiated with teachers before being implemented Second, teachers’ prior experiences should be an integral component of teacher education A CHINESE COLLEGE EFL TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 509 programs Teachers’ personal practical knowledge, which informs their practice of assessment, whether formative or summative, is often unexamined Practicums or workshops are needed to help preservice and in-service teachers examine their prior assessment experiences critically and reconstruct their personal practical knowledge Third, a safe workplace that promotes equality, trust, and democracy in the community is critical for teachers’ independent decision-making We are aware of the potential danger that teachers may encounter when they are subject to the power-laden relations in their workplace The reduced sense of security may put teachers’ professional judgment at peril and further hamper teachers’ professional development in all aspects, including assessment Therefore, educational administrators, school leaders, and middle managers need to make joint efforts to minimize the negative effects of hierarchical power relationships and encourage professional dialogue in which negotiation of meaning and cooperation take place within the community ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Support for the project was provided in part through Funds of National Foreign Education from Beijing Foreign Studies University and Funds of Young Researchers from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (No 08Q23) We thank Kyle McIntosh at Purdue University, who kindly helped proofread the earlier versions of the article; Dr Jun Liu at Arizona University, who gave insightful comments on the writing-up of the manuscript; and Yiqiong Zhang at National University of Singapore, who shared her thoughts with us during the whole process We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, who provided invaluable feedback for our revisions of the article THE AUTHORS Yueting Xu is a lecturer at the School of English and Education of Guangdong 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