THE COMFORT OF COMPETENCE AND THE UNCERTAINTY OF ASSESSMENT

Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 2017

is that such a paper exists at all. As the authors state, developments in theories of assessment and in theories of learning have, for the most part, over the last hundred years or so, proceeded entirely separately. The central claim in the paper by Baird et al (2017) is that if theories of assessment take into account theories of learning, assessments will somehow be more valid, and some of the more egregious effects of assessment on learning will be ameliorated. At the outset, it seems to me important to acknowledge that this is an empirical, rather than a logical claim. There is no a priori reason that processes of development would be enhanced by attention to the processes by which the results of that development are assessed, nor that the processes of assessing the results of development would be improved by considering how that development took place. For example, if we consider the case of the 100 m at the Olympic Games, a theory of learning would provide insights into how people improve their sprinting ability, and would, as a result, help us improve the quality of sprinters, so that they record lower times for the 100 m at the Olympic Games. We could also look at ways of improving the accuracy of the measurement of the time taken by sprinters to run 100 m. However, the important point here is that these two processes are entirely separate. Improvements in the measurement of time do not help us improve the performance of athletes, and improvements in the performance of athletes do not contribute to measuring sprint times more accurately. The aetiology of a performance may be entirely irrelevant to the measurement of that performance. This is reasonably obvious where the assessment involves well-defined measures like time, but it can also be an issue where the assessment involves other aspects of human performance. If we wanted to assess achievement in a particular domain, then it seems plausible that assessments that indicate how far a student falls short of a desired level of performance in that domain would provide useful information about what might be done next. However, such a belief assumes that levels of performance in an assessment represent stages through which learners progress-a variant of Haeckel's idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (Haeckel, 1866). While this may often be true, recent advances in cognitive psychology suggest that this is often not the case. For example, if we want students to become better at mathematical problem solving, it seems obvious that the best way to do this is for students to practice mathematical problem solving. However, as John Sweller and his colleagues have shown (e.g. Sweller, Kalyuga, &

The flip-side of teaching-as-delivery is assessment-as-ventriloquism. Required to describe pupils and their progress through the language of Level Descriptors and exam grade criteria, any teacher risks losing her voice. This article notes the hierarchising and normalising intention of currently authorised versions of assessment, and looks for a countervailing practice and language.

2009

2000

Many authors over the past twenty years have argued that the prevailing ‘psychometric’ paradigm for educational assessment is inappropriate and have proposed that educational assessment should develop its own distinctive paradigm. More recently (and particularly within the last five years) it has become almost commonplace to argue that changes in assessment methods are required because of changing views of human cognition, and in particular, the shift from ‘behaviourist’ towards ‘constructivist’ views of the nature of human learning. However, these changes are still firmly rooted within the psychometric paradigm, since within this perspective, the development of assessment is an essentially ‘rationalist’ project in which values play only a minor (if any) role. The validation of an assessment proceeds in a ‘scientific’ manner, and the claim is that the results of any validation exercise would be agreed by all informed observers. Developing on the work of Samuel Messick, in this paper...

Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research & Perspective, 2003

2001). The committee issuing this report was charged with synthesizing advances in the cognitive sciences and measurement, and exploring their implications for improving educational assessment. The article opens with a vision for the future of educational assessment that represents a significant departure from the types of assessments typically available today, and from the ways in which such assessments are most commonly used. This vision is driven by an interpretation of what is both necessary and possible for educational assessment to positively impact student achievement. The argument is made that realizing this vision requires a fundamental rethinking of the foundations and principles guiding assessment design and use. These foundations and principles and their implications are then summarized in the remainder of the article. The argument is made that every assessment, regardless of its purpose, rests on three pillars: (1) a model of how students represent knowledge and develop competence in the subject domain, (2) tasks or situations that allow one to observe students' performance, and (3) interpretation methods for drawing inferences from the performance evidence collected. These three elements-cognition, observation, and interpretation-must be explicitly connected and designed as a coordinated whole. Section II summarizes research and theory on thinking and learning which should serve as the source of the cognition element of the assessment triangle. This large body of research suggests aspects of student achievement that one would want to make inferences about, and the types of observations, or tasks, that will provide evidence to support those inferences. Also described are significant advances in methods of educational measurement that make new approaches to assessment feasible. The argument is presented that measurement models, which are statistical exam-ples of the interpretation element of the assessment triangle, are cuuently available to support the kinds of inferences about student achievement that cognitive science suggests are important to pursue. Section III describes how the contemporary understanding of cognition and methods of measurement jointly provide a set of principles and methods for guiding the processes of assessment design and use. This section explores how the scientific foundations presented in Section II play out in the design of real assessment situations ranging from classroom to large-scale testing contexts. It also considers the role of technology in enhancing assessment design and use. Section IV presents a discussion of the research, development, policy, and practice issues that must be addressed for the field of assessment to move forward and achieve the vision described in Section I.

Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 2017

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

1991

This paper is intended to raise questions and identify some of the problems posed by assessment within an educational setting. The principal aim is to offer a springboard for discussion, rather than to propose a specific plan of action. It is also worth stressing that assessment designates more than just examinations (public or otherwise). As teachers and educators, we are constantly making assessments of our students, passing official, unofficial, conscious and unconscious judgements. These are judgements which inevitably influence our attitudes to our jobs, our performance and our teaching or administrative styles. They also have wide-ranging repercussions on the attitudes, performances and future of our students. They are judgements based on a complex series of assumptions which we habitually make about, for instance, what education involves, the nature of schooling, school structures and their aims, the learning process as it relates to human development. What follows is largely inspired by a desire to identify and scrutinize some of the most recurrent of these assumptions.

Critical Quarterly, 2000

2018

In book: Changing Educational Landscapes, 2010

Assessment is an internal part of school life and is used in a variety of ways; although assessment and instruction are often conceived as "curiously separate in both time and purpose" (Graue 1993: 291), recent research shows that the form of assessment applied depends on the purpose that it serves as well as on the specific "trends" in the field of evaluation at the local and/or international levels, with these trends to be related to the scientific and theoretical/ideological underpinnings of the applied assessment model and its use. Within this context, the range of use of assessment has changed over time taking several forms like teacher classroom assessment, standard tasks, coursework, records of achievement-portfolios as well as practical and oral assessment, written examinations and standardised tests. There is criterion-referenced assessment, formative assessment and performance-based assessment, as well as non-referenced testing .