Student Perceptions of Assessment Practices: Insights from Test-Taking Narratives

Testing has traditionally been a critical component of educational programmes. While there is a considerable amount of research on various dimensions of assessment, only a limited number of studies have explored learners’ perceptions of assessment practices, to date. Accordingly, this qualitative study is an attempt to examine a group of undergraduate university students’ perceptions of their past assessment practices. To this end, 30 Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) students who had just taken a course on Language Assessment were asked to compose narratives (of at least 2000 words) about their assessment experiences. The collected data were then analyzed thematically, and the results indicated that students mostly held negative feelings toward their previous language assessment practices. Moreover, most of the students did not assign any significance to assessment, considering it redundant. The study found that instilling more positive views toward assessment is required to improve self-regulatory learning and therefore better learning outcomes in students.