Learning and assessment: a long and winding road?
Dylan Wiliam2017, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
Abstract
For most of the considerable period of time during which they have been objects of scholarly study, learning and assessment have indeed, as the focal paper of this special issue of Assessment in Education argues, been 'fields apart' (Baird, Andrich, Hopfenbeck, & Stobart, 2017). It is certainly easy to generate plenty of plausible hypotheses about why this happened. While early attempts to measure human capabilities, such as the gruelling civil service examinations in fourteenth century China, did assess what candidates had learned, it was the level of achievement, rather than the process through which a candidate had developed, that was of primary interest. Centuries later, when Alfred Binet developed a series of tests of the achievement of schoolchildren, his focus was on determining which students might struggle in mainstream schools. Moreover, he was clear that this process of identification was simply to identify which students might need more help and which did not: The procedures which I have indicated will, if perfected, come to classify a person before or after such another person, or such another series of persons; but I do not believe that one may measure one of their intellectual aptitudes in the sense that one measures a length or a capacity. Thus, when a person studied can retain seven figures after a single audition, one can class him, from the point of view of his memory for figures, after the individual who retains eight figures under the same conditions and before those who retain six. It is a classification, not a measurement. (Binet, quoted in Varon, 1936, p. 41, my emphasis) Binet's ideas were brought to the United States by Henry Herbert Goddard, Director of Research at the New Jersey Training School in Vineland-a school for 'feeble-minded' students-and again, the focus was on classifying students. As Goddard himself remarked, ' A classification of our children based on the [Binet] Scale agreed with the Institution experience' (Goddard, 1916, p. 5). Binet, and to a lesser extent, Goddard, believed that ability might be increased through appropriate educational experiences, but they did not see the assessments as being in any way useful for determining the kinds of educational experiences that should be organised. The tests were useful in identifying students who needed help, and nothing more. Learning and assessment were treated as separate, unrelated processes. One involved filling learners' minds with content, while the other was simply a process of stocktaking. Other early researchers saw assessment and learning as separate, but for different reasons. Lewis Terman, who had been appointed to the post of Professor of Education at Stanford University in 1910, believed that ability was fixed, and innate. He was particularly concerned that since, at the time, the diagnosis of mental retardation was regarded as the prerogative of doctors rather than psychologists, a child would be unlikely to be diagnosed as retarded unless the retardation were severe. He saw in the Binet tests a way of identifying the abilities of individuals with much greater precision than had been possible beforehand; in particular, it would be possible to identify what he called 'higher-grade defectives' that doctors might miss. When the United States joined the Great War in 1917, Goddard and many of his colleagues were concerned that 'feeble-minded' soldiers might be easily tricked into letting enemy spies into a camp, and suggested stationing a 'psychological examiner' at every recruiting station (Goddard, 1917). Robert Yerkes, then president of the American Psychological Association, convened a group of mental testing experts, including Goddard and Terman, to plan how these examiners might be trained. However, at its first meeting, the group abandoned these plans
