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Introduction
Teachers' decisions in their professional practices influence the overall environment of the classroom with a positive or negative impact on students learning (Kauchak and Eggen, 2007; Borich, 2014). They are an important element in the process of students' learning. Accordingly, a good deal of evidence has been reported detecting the effect of teacher related variables such as qualification, experience, personality, IQ, classroom practices and teacher effectiveness on students' learning. Though, the results of such studies have not been consistent in relation to the discovery of strong relationship of the constructs (Goe, 2007). Therefore, researchers despite characteristics of teachers, focused behavior as found to be significantly linked with students' learning outcome (Araujo, Carneiro, Cruz-Aguayo, and Schady, 2014). Considering the fact that behaviors are the reflections of hidden belief systems, it may be concluded that teachers' believes would have an effect on students' learning.
These believes would be one of the possible and valid causes of teachers' varied behaviors towards different components of teaching learning process. While these become the reason for varied students learning outcomes as well. Scholars argue that teachers' perception and practice of excellent teaching depends on how he/she conceptualizes it (Biggs, 2012). Consequently, teaching behavior of teachers' encompassing perceptions and student evaluations are influenced by their belief system regarding teaching, learning, curriculum, assessment and self-efficacy (Brown, 2003).
Beliefs working as clusters form conceptions, whereas the word conception is a broader term that consists of an organized system of beliefs (Remesal, 2011). It includes the knowledge and beliefs of a person which affect the formation of conceptions (Elliot and Chan, 2004). This clarification is quite helpful to avoid any operational issues that might emerge as a result of scholars' attempts to differentiate between belief and conception (Barnes et al., 2017). In order to explore teachers' conceptions about assessment, actual purpose behind an assessment event was investigated (Brown, 2008; Black and William, 1998). The literature showed three different purposes for which the assessment events were arranged (Black and William 1998; National Research Council, 2001; Torrance and Pryor, 1998), including improvement, accountability of schools and accountability of students. Another fourth purpose was observed among teachers that showed assessment as an irrelevant activity for teaching learning process.
This purpose has been named as irrelevance (Shohamy, 2001)....