Students’ Conceptions of Assessment

Abstract

Demonstrating factor invariance across population characteristics is an important facet of validating instruments. A new instrument to examine students’ conceptions of assessment (SCoA) has been demonstrated in studies to show significant relations to secondary school students’ academic performance in mathematics and reading. The research reported here investigates the stability of the factor structure and structural relationships to achievement in reading comprehension across student sex, year-level, and ethnicity. Multiple group confirmatory factor analysis found, in a sample of 3,506 students, that the factor structure of the SCoA was invariant. Conversely, statistically significant differences for sex, year, and ethnicity were found for how the conceptions of assessment related to academic performance in reading. These differences between the structural models may not indicate a deficiency in the instrument but, rather, sensitivity to real-world differences among subgroups. The structural differences can be understood in terms of sex differences in approaches to learning, year differences in participation in the New Zealand national qualifications assessment system, and ethnic differences in experience of bias and prejudice in schooling.