Ensuring effective learning and teaching requires a strong assessment culture in schools where teachers and students are supported to use assessment and assessment data to increase learning outcomes. This assessment culture is characterised by a shared understanding of assessment principles, processes, and practices, common assessment language to have a common reference for discussing the competing understanding and conceptualisations (Davison, 2013), strong leadership support (Christoforidou & Kyriakides, 2021; Davari Torshizi & Bahraman, 2019), student engagement in assessment (Hannigan et al., 2022), and presence of enabling and supporting mechanisms (Alonzo, Leverett, et al., 2021). There are various approaches used and reported in the literature to build a strong assessment culture, including teacher-led initiatives (Adie et al., 2021), school-led whole-school approach to building teacher capacity (Hopfenbeck et al., 2015), development and implementation of assessment framework or tools (Prytula et al., 2013), and enactment of the system-level policy (Verhoeven & Devos, 2005). However, assessment is context-based (Alonzo, Labad, et al., 2021), and thus, building a strong assessment culture requires a deep analysis of personal, social-emotional, conceptual, paradigmatic, practical, contextual, structural, organisational, and policy contexts of the school to determine the best strategies to support students and teachers.  

This paper demonstrates how schools develop their assessment culture by using a situational analysis to explore the various elements influencing the school’ assessment culture to have an in-depth understanding of the situation. In this study, we worked with school leaders and teachers of five schools to develop their context-dependent assessment culture. To achieve the aims of our study, the following research questions will be answered:

1. What are the dominant discourse around assessment that exist in schools? 
2. What are the major issues/debates that influence teachers’ assessment practices? 
3. What are the temporal, spatial, political, and socio-cultural issues that shaped the current assessment culture of the school?  and
4. Who are the key decision makers and implementers of assessment reform in schools?

Theoretical Framework  

The activity theory was used as a theoretical framework to build a strong assessment culture of participating schools. The activity theory (Engeström, 1987) is based on Vygotsky's (1978) proposition on the primacy of culture rather than individual cognition in mediating action, learning, and meaning-making. In this view, the social interactions of individuals within the community facilitate learning. This view will help explain how teachers’ interactions within the school (i.e., with other teachers, school leaders, students, parents/carers) and at the system level influence their understanding, views, beliefs, perceptions and knowledge about assessment. In addition, the activity theory is useful for understanding how different factors work together to influence various socially and culturally mediated activities to achieve the intended outcomes. 

Specifically, the third generation of activity theory was used (Engeström, 2015). This theory describes the six elements and how they interact. These include the subjects (people who are the focused of the study/engaged in activity), roles of the objects (experiences, knowledge and physical products), tools (documents, resources, etc), and community (people or stakeholders), rules (policy, codes, conventions, agreements), division of labour (division of activity amongst participants in the activity). The subjects work as part of the community to achieve the object or the outcome of the activity. Their interactions are guided by the rules and divisions of labour. The quality of the interactions among objects, tools and the community determine the quality of the outcomes. In other words, the tools mediate the relationships between the subject and the object of activity. The ultimate goal is to transform the object into outcomes, and this requires the effective use of tools available in the system. 

We used a situational analysis to explore the various elements influencing the school’ assessment culture. Situational analysis is an extension of grounded theory where the analysis is not confined to human action but to a broader situation (Clarke et al., 2017). The situation includes non-human actors, discourses, debates, issues, implicated actors, power relations, among others. The situational analysis provides us a lens to capture the complex and heterogenous nature of building an assessment culture and how the various elements, actors, and factors intersect. The strong adherence of situational analysis to context in analysing the situation, in this study, the assessment culture, resonate the context-dependent nature of assessment. Seven school leaders (principals, deputy principals, department heads) and seven teachers from each participating schools were invited to participate in this study. Focus group interviews were conducted to collect data. The use of focus group is deemed appropriate to the aims of the research and to answer the research questions. This method allowed for participants to interact with each other, discussing their responses, reacting to other participants’ responses, which create a richer discussion, with various perspectives critiqued and examined (Bryman, 2016). The interviews were audio-recorded, and no identifiable information was gathered except for the respective schools of teachers and school leaders. The school label is critically important for school level analysis to ensure that the strategies to be developed and implemented adhere to the context of individual schools and addresses the needs and aspirations of the school community. The interview data were analysed following the six steps outlined by Braun and Clarke (2022). We ensured the credibility of our research through prolonged engagement (the project runs from 2022-2026), rapport building (we built a strong partnership with schools), iterative questioning (the interviewers are skilful), data triangulation (multiple sources of data), member checking (focus group transcripts were sent to the participants to review), and inclusive coding (two researchers will engage in iterative coding). In addition, the dependability of our research was ensured through describing our inclusion criteria of participants. Our co-design with school leaders and teachers ensure that all involved in the process agree to the interpretation of the data and use of the findings. Moreover, we adhered to the conformability of the research by engaging in a reflexive practice to ensure that our beliefs, views, perceptions, knowledge, and skills about assessment will not influence the research process to reach bias-free results.

Initial analysis of the interview transcripts revealed key themes, including aspiration for using assessment (support learning, adopt teaching, evaluation of teaching effectiveness, and meet reporting and accountability requirements); key decision makers and implementers of assessment reform in schools (higher authorities, principal, deputy principals, department heads, teachers, parents, students); non-human elements in enacting assessment reform in school (technology, resources, funding); dominant discourses around assessment hindering or supporting teachers’ assessment practices (e.g., validity and reliability of teachers’ assessment, high-stake tests, rigid curriculum); major issues/debates in schools about the use of assessment (e.g., formative versus summative; accountability versus learning function of assessment); major issues/debates at the system level or wider academic community that impacts school assessment practices (e.g., reliance on national data; using assessment for performance evaluation, labelling of schools based on assessment data, budget cut); temporal elements impacting school assessment practices (curriculum reform, change of school leadership, disruptions, international testing); spatial elements impacting school assessment practices (school location, school type/classification); political/economic issues (budget cut, representation of assessment in national policies, competing advice); and socio-cultural issues (power relations among actors, diversity of students, parental expectations). After the completion of data collection in term 1 2025, we will generate “situational maps”, “relational maps”, “social maps” and “positional maps” that will highlight the internal and external environments of the school, including elements to identify opportunities and challenges for building a strong assessment culture of the five participating schools. We will work closely with school leaders and teachers at each school to co-develop their own theory of change (ToC) to describe and illustrate what and how the desired assessment culture is expected to develop (Reinholz & Andrews, 2020). Using the CHAT as the guiding framework, we will identify the subjects, objects, tools, rules, community, and division of labour necessary to build an assessment culture.

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