Background: Researchers have indicated that assessment practices and methods should support learners’ construction of meaningful understanding of knowledge. Understanding students’ conceptions of assessment will enable us to construct more realistic, valid and fair assessments. Learners’ conceptualization of assessment would be imperative to serve as an essential reference to evaluate their learning progress.
Purpose: This study evaluated and compared the Singaporean and Taiwanese middle school students’ conceptions of science assessment. Within-country gender comparisons were also explored.
Sample: 424 Taiwanese and 333 Singaporean eighth graders were invited for a cross-country comparison.
Design and methods: The participants completed a questionnaire named Conceptions of Science Assessment.
Results: The findings showed that the summative assessment dominates in the Taiwanese classrooms, while formative and summative assessment are usually perceived in Singaporean classrooms. The Singaporean students had a greater tendency than their Taiwanese counterparts to perceive the purpose of assessment as a way of reproducing knowledge, and the formative assessment as improving learning, problem-solving, and critical judgment. No gender differences were found among either the Singaporean or the Taiwanese students.
Conclusions: Educators in both countries should provide learners with more opportunities to experience process-oriented science assessment activities and de-emphasize the usage of examination-oriented practices to achieve the sophistication of conceptions. 相似文献
Leading developing countries have recently introduced some reforms in their national intellectual property regimes to harmonize them with international treaties and agreements. However, major differences remain in how these laws are applied to different information industries, and how they are enforced on the ground. While intellectual property law applies to a host of information products ranging from music to computer programs, governments have selectively enforced the law in some information industries, while neglecting to extend the same protection to others. Based on the comparative institutionalist approach, this article identifies two variables--state-industry linkages and level of innovative activity--that may explain the selective enforcement of intellectual property law. Intellectual property rights were expected to be better protected in information industries with strong state-industry linkages and higher levels of domestic innovation. This expectation was tested through a comparative study of four intellectual property industries from the Asian region. The results confirmed the expectation, but also demonstrated that strong state-industry linkages may independently correlate with high levels of intellectual property protection, even in industries where the current levels of innovative activity are low. 相似文献
