A Time to Rebalance Improvement and Accountability Goals

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Assessment understood as enabling

A time to rebalance improvement and accountability goals

Claire Wyatt-Smith, Valentina Klenowski and Peta Colbert

C. Wyatt-Smith
Australian Catholic University
e-mail:

• V. Klenowski
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia

• P. Colbert
Griffith University
Brisbane, Australia

Abstract

This chapter outlines a perspective of educational assessment as enabling, whereby the learner is central and assessment is focused on supporting the knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary for lifelong learning. It argues that better education for young people is achievable when educational policy and practice give priority to learning improvement, thereby making assessment for accountability a related, though secondary, concern. The chapter describes how this work of internationally recognized scholars brings together diverse perspectives and theoretical frameworks and, in so doing, provides readers with a range of ways to consider their pathway through the book. A ‘map’ and summaries of chapters suggest a reading according to thematic approach, geographical setting, author/s profile or content purposes depending on the reader’s own priorities. A section on assessment past, present and futures calls for a rebalancing of improvement and accountability goals, and for countries to be careful to avoid privileging large-scale testing over other forms of data about learning and achievement.

This book presents a fresh, even provocative, perspective on educational assessment as enabling. It presents a picture of assessment as placing the learner at the center of the learning encounter and then broadening the remit for assessment to the knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary for lifelong learning. More specifically, the book declares the position that better education for young people is achievable when educational policy and practice give priority to learning improvement, thereby making assessment for accountability a related, though secondary, concern. This position is consistent with the increasing recognition of the need to rebalance improvement and accountability goals (OECD, 2013) and for countries to be careful to avoid privileging large-scale testing over other forms of data about learning and achievement. Readers will encounter new insights about the relationships between assessment, teaching and learning, and are invited to consider how assessment extends to matters of ethics and equity in contemporary classroom practice. Further, the contributing authors offer readers cutting-edge knowledge derived from diverse contexts and countries, and a focus on what practice ‘looks like’ when it starts from the position of assessment as enabling is common across the chapters.

The book frames the field at a time characterized by increasingly loud calls for assessment reform. Such reform has assumed prominence internationally as governments and jurisdictions involved in all phases of education seek to respond to a wide range of societal and economic imperatives. Indeed, in many countries there is an abundance of challenges. These include: high levels of youth unemployment; the changing demands on the workforce, for not only necessary knowledge and skills, but also dispositions of creativity, innovation and flexibility; large-scale shifts in populations; budget cuts; rapid changes in technology and related communications practices; and, concurrently, the increasing press to address cultural and social diversity in order to achieve equity and the provision of quality education for all. Educational assessment and change cannot be considered without recognition of such societal, contextual changes.

While context is therefore central to discussions of the function of assessment, we put forward the view that when assessment is understood as inquiry, at a deep level it can connect to learning and teaching and, in turn, can enable learners and teachers in ways not otherwise possible. Moreover, adopting an inquiry approach to assessment in the classroom involves developing new relationships between teacher and learner, and among learners, with assessment taken to be a shared enterprise. This opens the opportunity in this book to reflect on how assessment, viewed differently, can promote conditions under which teachers and students can flourish in learning and teaching.

Within this recurring focus of the chapters, the accounts of practice that readers will encounter in the various sections of the book are diverse. This reflects the diversity of the international team of writers assembled in the book, representing many different countries and a wide range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to learning and assessment. From its genesis as an idea, the book was committed to recognizing, valuing and celebrating this diversity.

While readers will encounter diversity, they will also see emerging across the chapters a compelling coherence of ideas. It is as though the book offers many voices, but they come together to carry forward three main, strong ideas throughout the chapters. First is the idea that theoretically informed professionals are at the core of effective provision of education; second, that quality assessment and quality learning and teaching are integrally related, and third, that the alignment of assessment with curriculum, teaching and learning is the linchpin to efforts to improve both learning opportunities and outcomes for all.

As each of the chapters offers new perspectives on the enabling power of assessment, readers will also encounter validity and reliability—the traditional cannons of assessment—which remain foundational and therefore necessary. However, they are not of themselves sufficient for quality education. Assessment needs to be radically reconsidered in the context of unprecedented societal change and with new opportunities to use technology to leverage changes in assessment not possible in earlier eras. Further, it is clear that, increasingly, communities are segregating more by wealth, with clear signs of social, political, economic and environmental instability, as suggested earlier. These changes raise important questions relating to ethics, equity and fairness, as well as the legal rights of the child. More fundamentally, these changes bring to the fore serious social justice questions about what society counts as quality learning, and about the continued relevance of schooling. This is especially the case given the prevailing conditions in many countries in which examinations function to constrain teaching and learning opportunities. This is not intended to suggest that large-scale, standardized examinations for reporting or certification purposes do not have a legitimate place in twenty-first century schooling. It is, however, to declare that the time has come to liberate learning and, in turn, teaching, from the regulatory influence of examinations where these have exerted strong influence and have led to unintended consequences in what happens in classrooms.

In taking up the challenge to support the debate about assessment reform and how assessment can be enabling for learning, the book offers readers new knowledge about re/engaging learners across all phases of education. There is clear evidence internationally of student disengagement from education, particularly young males. There is also evidence of the high costs to individuals, communities and government systems when young people are marginalized and lack the necessary knowledge and skills to contribute to the workforce and to their families and broader society in productive ways. Teachers can support students who are marginalized when assessment is seen as enabling and as a ‘field of exchange’ (Connolly, 2012). Here, the teacher as learner sees the student not in deficit terms but ‘recognizes’ the student’s culturally specific forms of knowledge, skills, aesthetics and dispositions (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Such recognized resources can be used pedagogically as a ‘form of exchange’ (Connolly, 2012) in the assessment process. These views, of the learner and assessment, value the social and cultural capital that such young people bring to the learning context of the classroom. The teacher’s role is to harness such capital to promote further learning and development of skills for socially valued forms such as credentials and certificates of achievement.

In advancing the concept of assessment as enabling, the book places high-quality assessment as the driver for improving teacher efficacy, and explores ethical and inclusive practices. Such practices recognize the agency of learners and call for a different teacher–student relationship where the both are learners, who gain important knowledge from interactions and exchanges during assessment processes. Where opportunities are opened up for students to be brought into assessment practice as a shared enterprise, together with their parents, teachers and aides, aspirations and expectations can be facilitated and raised (Luke et al., 2013). Here, the use of analyses of students’ achievement data is crucial for diagnostic and planning purposes. However, school leaders and teachers need support and resources to make informed decisions based on the monitoring and analysis of assessment data. The involvement of parents in discursive assessment practices helps to develop useful and productive relationships that can only be beneficial for both the students and their teachers. Empirical research on classroom assessment practice and the interactions among systems, teachers and students are drawn upon to develop these important issues related to social justice and equity.

About the book: Authors, structure, chapters and features

Our authors

New perspectives are offered to readers in this book from leading assessment writers and researchers from a range of countries including: Ireland, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Norway, United States, Canada, Netherlands, Israel, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. The editors and contributing authors are recognized internationally in assessment, learning and related fields: curriculum development, teaching, pedagogy, ethics and legal responsibility, leadership, technology, education policy and social change.

The structure

The book’s structure and content reflect international interest in assessment as contextualized, historical practice, as well as theories of learning and teaching that underpin particular assessment approaches. Assessment, contexts, learning theories and practices are the overarching organizers in the book’s structure and content. This book is timely in that it presents new knowledge about the relationships among curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, learning and learners, and drivers of equity and quality.

The book is organized into five sections:

1 Assessment quality

2 Becoming assessment literate

3 Teachers’ responsibilities in assessment

4 Leading learning through a focus on the enabling power of assessment

5 Digital assessment.

Section 1 raises questions of assessment quality and the place of learning theory (see Chapters 2–5). The chapters in this section explore what is involved in aligning assessment to teaching and learning for local and systemic purposes. Given this foregrounding of assessment quality and learning theory, Section 2 attends to the knowledges and capabilities that teachers require in their classroom assessment practices, such as: designing assessment tasks and analyzing how to use assessment evidence to identify the implications for changing teaching and promoting learning (see Chapters 6–11). Section 3 addresses teachers’ responsibilities in assessment (see Chapters 12–17). Issues related to ethics and equity, judgement and the use of standards in assessment practice are critically analyzed. Section 4 relates to the role of education leaders in developing, upscaling and sustaining high-quality assessment cultures for improved workforce assessment capabilities (see Chapters 18–21). Finally, Section 5 considers the future of assessment in the ever-evolving field of information technology (see Chapters 22–23). Important issues of the social rights and responsibilities of assessment to contribute towards efforts to build social capital and informed citizenry, as well as the language of assessment to ensure equitable access for different cultures, are also considered in this final section.

The chapters

To ensure coherence across the suite of chapters, authors were asked to address their choice of conceptual/theoretical framework, the implications for action and the essential next questions or future directions. Additionally, each chapter weaves into the discussion as appropriate:

• the central question/s and consideration of the main issue/s
• the stance or position taken by the author/s
• empirical data
• counter positions and arguments.

The 23 chapters in this book apply a range of theoretical stances to consider diverse assessment matters. To support readers in a pathway through the chapters, we offer an advance organizer, which offers a quick reference that maps the chapters and may be useful for readers who wish to pursue a thematic approach to reading.

Table 1.1 Outline of chapters

Please set table in landscape format.

Chapter summaries

In the following, Chapters 2 to 23 are reviewed in order to assist readers with determining their pathway through the book.

In Chapter 2, Willis and Cowie adopt a sociocultural view of assessment for learning (AfL to argue that the generative dance of knowing (Cook and Brown, 2005) could be used by teachers to better understand the importance of participation for student learning. Conceptualizing assessment as a generative dance, AfL practices are viewed as being ‘part of a dialectical and cultural process of increasing understanding and control of the learning process by the learner’ (p. *). Drawing on observations of a Year 9 science classroom in which students participate in a range of learning opportunities, the authors demonstrate the power of building ‘an awareness of patterns of knowledge making’ for understanding and generating ‘further opportunities and spaces for agency and interaction’ (p.*) assessment contexts.

In Chapter 3, Tillema calls for sharper focus to be placed on inducting students into the repertoire of assessment practices, to enable them to fully engage in an AfL culture. Applying a conceptual framework focusing on the student’s involvement in assessment, the chapter examines the role of students in stages of the assessment process through varied involvement in five distinct types of peer assessment (peer marking, peer feedback, peer grading, peer appraisal and peer evaluation) as each has ‘considerable and differential effects on the provision of assessment information’ (p. *). Through an analysis of 41 empirical studies or reviews of such work, the author finds that student involvement is undervalued in pecific stages in the assessment process, namely, goal formulation, task formulation and appraisal. The author concludes by drawing attention to future research that may be conducted on ways to increase student involvement in monitoring their own learning.

In Chapter 4, Care, Griffin, Zhang and Hutchinson examine large-scale testing and the contribution that such testing can make to student learning. With the conceptual foundation challenging the notion that ‘assessment for change informs learning and teaching, while assessment for identification of current state informs policy’ (p. *), the authors argue that a change in approaches to assessment is required. The chapter presents a rigorous, statistically driven approach to analysis of data from schools involved in the Assessment and Learning Partnerships (Victoria, Australia) program. With a strong focus on linking testing data to individual students’ zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1986), the authors turn to analyze the performance data across a school year for four grades. A critical finding from this analysis indicates that Australian policy initiatives, such as Closing the Gap (MCEEDYA, 2009), are being realized, but with lack of proportionate rates of growth existing for the higher-performing students. That is, teachers and schools are demonstrating the skills required to use the data from large-scale assessment to respond to policy initiatives and to improve student learning, but not for all students, equally.