EXPLORING STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF LEARNING OUTCOME ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY AT NONG LAM UNIVERSITY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18173/2354-1075.2026-0058Keywords:
perceptions of assessment, Improvement, External Attribute, IrrelevanceAbstract
This study analyzed how learning outcome assessment was perceived by Nong Lam University students across four dimensions: Improvement, External attribution, Affective/Social and Irrelevance. Adopting a mixed-methods design, quantitative data were gathered by an adapted version of Brown’s (2008) Student Conceptions of Assessment (SCoA) scale, supported with qualitative analysis from interviews with 25 students from different majors to investigate the experiences and perceptions of assessment practices. Results showed strong endorsement of the Improvements and Affect/ Social, demonstrating participants’ favouring of assessment as a formative and motivational tool. The moderate agreement in the External Attributions indicated some awareness of assessment’s signaling role whereas the Irrelevance dimension recorded the lowest mean scores and the greatest variability, indicating mixed perceptions of fairness and usefulness. With the exception of Irrelevance, where male students showed greater agreement, gender analysis revealed no significant differences. Taken together, these findings offer both conceptual and contextual contributions to the literature on students’ conceptions of assessment. The study extends the SCoA framework to learning outcome assessment in Vietnamese higher education and shows that students’ perceptions reflect a transitional assessment culture, in which strong support for improvement and social engagement coexists with concerns about fairness, pressure, and over-assessment.
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