This paper examines teachers’ professional judgement at a key moment of schooling (sixth grade, the last year of primary school) when decisions are made regarding students’ orientation towards differentiated tracks of the secondary school system. Although the final choice of the track is decided by the secondary school administration, this decision is based on information collected during sixth grade: grades obtained by the student, recommendations of the teacher, the inspector and the family, results of the student on psychopedagogical tests. In this context, assessment has high stakes for the students and their families and is thus likely to reveal the complexity of the factors which intervene in teachers’ professional judgement. The conceptual framework of our research is derived from studies of professional work in context. The approach of Schön (1983) concerns professionals’ reflexive thought in and on action and distinguishes routine situations from those where questioning appears, causing a more conscious and structured thought process. The research on naturalistic decision making, developed by Klein (1997), has shown the importance of a professional’s capacity to detect the relevant elements of a situation (situation awareness) and to confer meaning on them (sensemaking). Our research also refers to work on situated cognition (e.g., Wenger, 1998) postulating a dialectical relation between the individual’s functioning at the psychological level and the development of social and cultural practices in a professional community. The present paper concerns one of the topics dealt with in a study concerning the role of teachers’ professional judgement in assessment, namely the links between assessment and orientation. In this paper, we seek to answer to the following general question: How does teachers’ professional judgement function in the procedures of student orientation? More specifically, we wish to identify a) the role of the various partners in the process leading to the orientation decision, b) the correspondence between pre-orientation and final orientation, c) the links between summative and prognostic aspects of assessment.

Interviews were conducted with 10 sixth-grade teachers at the end of the second and the third trimesters of the school year. The sample of classes was representative of the overall student population. The interviews concerned several aspects of the teachers’ assessment practices, particularly their ways of determining grades and of making and communicating recommendations regarding students’ future studies. The main focus of the interviews was on teachers’ practices with respect to students whose achievement results fluctuated between sufficient (grade of 4) and insufficient (grade of 3) since these situations can be particularly revealing of the role of teachers’ professional judgement in assessment. The teachers provided documentation of their practice: assessment instruments, reports, notices regarding students’ pre-orientation and orientation. Interviews were transcribed, coded and analysed with a structured qualitative approach. The data were categorized in different “formats”, one of which brought together all the information about students’ orientation.

Recommendations differ from those of parents in a quarter of the cases at the time of pre-orientation. At the end of the school year, almost all the parents propose an orientation that coincides with teachers’ recommendations. In addition, almost all recommendations correspond to the orientations decided at the end of the school year by the secondary school. Our findings show, moreover, that teachers’ recommendations are the consequence of a long process of consultation with the various partners. The steps of summative assessment carried out by the teachers during the school year to establish grades in the students’ report cards contain an underlying prognostic dimension, which generally appears when the stake of the hesitation between two grades has a consequence for the track under consideration. Attributing a grade that is insufficient creates the risk that the student will have to accept an orientation toward a track with lower requirements.