Assessment Across Borders: National Perspectives Explain Differences Between Singaporean and US Evaluators

Abstract

This study suggests that analytical tools to assess writing across genre can be meaningfully used across different countries. However, evaluators' “national perspectives” are likely to impact the assessment of content, particularly as it relates to completing the writing task. We compared Singaporean and American evaluators' assessment of written responses to workplace scenarios, requiring critiquing a superior’s ideas. Two responses were collected from upper-level business school students at a major university in the Republic of Singapore: one response prior to and another at the end of a business communication course. Holistic scores of this corpus were used as a basis for selection of a core sample of 468 responses, which Singaporean and US evaluators independently scored on four analytical tools: task, reasoning units, coherence, and error interference. US evaluators gave significantly higher scores on task fulfillment and reasoning units than did Singaporean evaluators, and only the US evaluators found improvement in the post-assessment compared with the pre-assessment. Subsequent textual analyses suggested that these differences stemmed from content preferences we characterize as national perspectives - US evaluators favored an external “proactive” focus based on potential gains, whereas Singaporeans preferred an internal focus based on avoidance of potential losses. This finding has implications for cross-national education, assessment and training.