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Assessment in education occurs for different purposes – formative, summative, diagnostic, and each with different focus on educational process, education outcomes, and developmental reasons. Researchers in Singapore have documented the existence of tensions between the entrenched high-stakes examinations and attempts to introduce new modes of assessments such as Assessment for Learning practices, partly because policy attempts to change assessments invariably clash with the examination culture in Singapore. This article reviews and critically analyses assessment policies and their attendant precedents and consequences in order to better understand why these tensions around assessment exists. Drawing from institutional theory and the model of gradual institutional change, the review covers an extended period of over 150 years of assessment policies in order to show how the policy layering and conversion processes are attempting to drive both assessment changes and systemic tensions. The article will discuss how parents as a significant policy actor not only constrain policy intentions but create new institutional mechanisms that perpetuate these tensions.
Wong et al. (Thu,) studied this question.