ABSTRACT
Stiggins (1999) recommended fundamental rethinking on assessment as the long tradition of attempting to incorporate assessment into school improvement equations have focused almost totally on the use of standardized tests. He found little emphasis on assessment in the preparation or professional development of teachers and concurred with several authors (eg, Calfee and Masuda, 1997; Farr and Griffin, 1973; McMillan, 2001) that teachers and administrators needed to grasp the assessment concepts, principles, techniques and procedures. Graue (1993) noted that the teacher-made emulations of standardized tests presented a barrier in implementing more constructivist instructional approaches and that the temporal and philosophical distance between assessment and instruction gradually led to assessment constraining and ultimately narrowing the scope of instruction-deskilling both the teachers and students. Since the student performance reported on official documents is a product of assessment, the assessment strategy strongly influences learning activities and could undermine the objectives of a teaching and learning system (Patel et al, 1999).
