Teachers' assessment practices for classroom diversity

Classrooms nowadays are exemplified by student diversity. Students may differ in, for example, motivation, learning style, aptitude, cultural background, social economic states, and past learning experience. As students’ learning needs are becoming increasingly diverse, a new challenge is to look for ways that address their needs. Assessment is one useful way to help teachers deal with classroom diversity. Teachers can use assessment strategies to identify different learning needs and to improve teaching and learning. This subsequently leads to a consideration of two critical issues with the first one being how teachers can plausibly identify classroom diversity and the second being how useful are the assessment strategies they use to cater for the identified diversity. This paper presents and discusses the findings of an investigation into the assessment strategies that teachers used to identify classroom diversity and the assessment strategies teachers used to deal with the identified diversity. About one hundred Hong Kong teachers were interviewed, revealing that the teachers used a number of assessment strategies to assist them in understanding students’ diverse needs and that the teachers seemed to be more interested in identifying those students who needed help academically rather than in their needs in the social and affective domains.