Table 1.

Conceptions of assessment in different educational settings

Basic education	Higher education	Medical education
- Assessment as “irrelevant” (little or harmful purpose) - Assessment for “school accountability” (quality control) - Assessment for “student accountability” (summative assessment) - Assessment for “improvement” of student learning and teaching (formative assessment) From Brown (2004)	- Assessment as “knowledge production” (teacher-centred) - Assessment as “knowledge construction/transformation” (learning-centred) From Samuelowicz and Bain (2002) - Assessment as “reproduction” (content-reproduction) - Assessment as “transformation” (student-development) From Postareff et al. (2012) - “Status quo” (teacher-centred; content-reproduction) - “Awareness” (content- and learning-centred) - “Development (shared autonomy; learning-centred) From Halinen et al. (2013)	- Psychometric: tailored vs. standardised assessment - Socio-constructivist: self- vs. externally-regulated learning - Agency (student-regulated learning) - Mutuality (student- and teacher-regulated learning) - Objectivity (externally-regulated assessment) - Adaptivity (externally- and clinically-regulated assessment) - Accountability (clinically-regulated assessment) From de Jonge et al. (2017)

These conceptions are those of educators working in Australia, Finland and The Netherlands. While not all of these papers explicitly used phenomenography or were about conceptions more broadly, many described one or more dimensions of a conception of assessment