Pre-service teachers' beliefs about evaluation

Abstract

Fifty-six Chinese pre-service teachers from three four-year teacher normal universities were interviewed about their evaluation beliefs through two perspectives: student-centred (PSSC) and teacher-centred (PSTC). The analysis yielded five areas of evaluation belief structure (who, when, how, why to evaluate students and what to be evaluation beliefs) with various subcomponents: content, reasoning, applications and procedures. Yet, all fifty-six pre-service teachers prone to compromise their beliefs in the future teaching practice. Implications for reformers, educators and pre-service/in-service teachers include the need to provide a firmer grounding in teacher training, to explore the reliability of evaluation belief systems, and to develop feasible instrument based the analysis of interview data to confirm pre-service teachers' evaluation beliefs on a big scale. All of these endeavours are paid for the new educational policies carried on smoothly and descending the confliction among different beliefs from reformers, researchers and pre/in-service teachers.