Pre-service teachers' beliefs about evaluation

Impacted deeply by the many years of experience as learners, pre-service always keep their educational beliefs as what evaluation is when they step into the normal university. Meanwhile, instructed by the theory of progressivism and traditionalism, fifty-six Chinese pre-service teachers from three four-year teacher normal universities in this qualitative study were interviewed by writing, group and individual interviews about their evaluation beliefs through two perspectives: student-centered(PSSC) and teacher-centered(PSTC). The analysis yielded five areas(who, when, how, why to evaluate students and what to be evaluation beliefs) of evaluation belief structure with various subcomponents: content, reasoning, applications and procedures. Yet, all fifty-six pre-service teachers prone to compromise their beliefs in the future teaching practice. Implications for reformers, educators and pre-in-service teachers include the need to provide a firmer grounding in teacher training, to explore the reliability of evaluation belief systems, and to develop feasible instrument based the analysis of interview data to confirm pre-service teachers' evaluation beliefs on a big scale. All of these endeavors are paid for the new educational policies carried on smoothly and descending the confliction among different beliefs from reformers, researchers and pre-in-service teachers. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Dr. Zafer Bekirogullari.