Investigating Primary School Teachers’ E-assessment Practices, Intentions and Influencing Factors in the New Normal: Implications for Developing E-assessment Policy

The blend of online and offline learning has been commonly considered as a trend of future education. Under the profound influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become the new normal in Hong Kong primary schools. To effectively maintain school accountability and facilitate education recovery and improvement, e-assessment (as a powerful alternative to traditional face-to-face assessment) has been much more frequently adopted by teachers in classrooms since the occurrence of the pandemic. In the existing basic education policy documents published in Hong Kong, e-assessment is suggested either as an efficient tool to decrease teachers’ workload in marking, recording and analyzing assessment data (e.g., Curriculum Development Council, 2014) or as e-tests which mainly serve for summative purposes and are linked with territory-wide system assessments (e.g., Education Bureau, 2012, 2015). There is still much room for policymakers to explicate how to balance the use of e-assessment for both formative and summative purposes so as to maximize the strengths of e-assessment in primary classrooms. Since considerable e-assessment experiences have been accumulated by teachers in the new normal, now should be a golden moment for researchers to investigate these fresh experiences so that suggestions can be made for policymakers to enrich and strengthen the existing e-assessment policy in Hong Kong primary schools. Underpinned by the well-established Theory of Planned Behaviour, this project will adopt an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design to explore primary school teachers’ e-assessment practices in classrooms, their intentions in using it and the factors influencing their decisions. 12 focus group interviews will be conducted with 72 teachers to identify teachers’ e-assessment practices in various school contexts and teachers’ intentions and considerations in planning and conducting e-assessment in classrooms. A large-scale survey based on the interview results will

Funding Source: HKSAR Govt - Public Policy Research Funding Scheme (PPR)