Relationships of Pre-service Teachers’ Formative Assessment Experience and Mastery Goal Orientation with their Conceptions of Assessment for Learning(AfL)

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of pre-service teachers’ formative assessment experience and mastery goal orientation with their conceptions of assessment. Especially, the improvement conception which is regarded as a core feature of ‘Assessment for Learning(AfL)’ and the structural relationships with its antecedent variables such as formative assessment experience and mastery goal orientation were scrutinized. Structural equation modeling analysis was used to analyze data collected from a sample of elementary and secondary pre-service teachers(N = 557) from teachers’ colleges located in four districts of Korea. The results were as follows. By the latent mean analysis, the conception of assessment for learning was not significantly different across elementary and secondary pre-service teachers. Second, the structural relationships between pre-service teachers’ improvement conception and its antecedent variables were equivalent across the two groups. Thirdly, the formative feedback had a positive effect on the quality of feedback and mastery goal orientation, while it did not make any significant direct effect on the improvement conception. The effects of the three mediating variables such as the quality of feedback, use of feedback and mastery goal orientation between the formative feedback and the improvement conception were statistically significant. Finally, the educational implications for developing pre-service teachers’ positive conceptions of assessment were discussed and this paper concludes with importance of the formative assessment experience for per-service teachers’s conceptions and practice.