Assessing and grading students’ work is one of the central parts of being a teacher. In meritocratic societies their assessments can be seen as important gatekeeping processes for access to higher education and working life since educational assessment is decisive for the allocation of life chances to individuals (Struck 2001). For these processes of gatekeeping to be legitimate, the examinations and the assessment on which they are grounded need to be perceived as fair – by those who receive marks and grades, the students, but as well by those who execute these assessments, the teachers. But what is considered fair differs considerably between different national and social contexts.
The project to be presented focuses on teachers` justice beliefs regarding assessment in school in Sweden and Germany, two countries in which classroom assessment by teachers plays an important role compared to other assessment systems. In both contexts assessment is framed differently through official guidelines (e.g. curriculum, laws and regulations), the structure of the education system and the role standardized assessment plays. Nevertheless teachers’ assessment practices in both countries can be seen as a vague and somewhat “personal practice” (Terhart 2008, S. 160) based on teachers` experience and ability of professional judgment. The contingency of educational settings and assessment situations requires situational decisions which open up a scope of action for teachers that can be filled in different ways in order to keep up legitimacy and professionalism of their work. Little is known about how teachers use this scope of action and on what kind of reasoning they base their decisions on. This is where this project tries to shed some light on.
The main research questions of the project are the following. First, what does “just assessment” mean to teachers in Sweden and Germany? This question focuses on teachers’ justice beliefs underlying their daily assessment in classroom. In order to reconstruct these beliefs the study focuses secondly on the question what strategies teachers employ in order to process just assessments. Both research foci concentrate on teachers’ own definitions and narrations – not on observations of their actual assessment practice. The aim is to find out more about the underlying beliefs and individual acts of sense making which enable teachers to face the manifold and sometimes conflicting expectations towards educational assessment in general.
By comparing teachers’ beliefs from two different countries with differing assessment systems the project tries to discover contextual influences on those beliefs as well. Teachers’ justice beliefs are conceptualized as partly implicit knowledge, which guides their professional acting and decision-making in a profound way. It can therefore be seen as part of teachers’ general professional belief systems (Pajares 1992; Reusser et al. 2011). In the presentation I will focus on teachers’ professional experience and self-description and their relation to different justice beliefs and strategies.
The study is part of the international research project “Different worlds of meritocracy? Educational assessment and conceptions of justice in Germany, Sweden and England in the age of ‘standards-based reform’” which is situated at Humboldt University, Berlin, and financed by the German Research Foundation’s Emmy Noether-Programme.
