Session Information
WERA SES 07 A, A Question of Fundamental Values and Practices: The Role of Assessment in Three Contexts
Symposium
Contribution
The objectives of this session are to explore the uses of assessment data in times of transition and within contexts of accountability. This symposium brings together critical reflections of researchers from England, New Zealand and Australia on developments in assessment that reflect the global drivers for increased use of evaluation and assessment data.
These contexts are each influenced, and in turn influence, national and global conversations about the relationships between assessment policies and innovations in education in order to raise educational achievement. Today, there is a requirement in many countries for greater effectiveness, equity and quality in education to meet economic and social demands with a parallel development in increasing school autonomy and the monitoring of schools’ improvement. Recent developments in information technology have also facilitated both large-scale and individualized student assessment, and sharing and management of data, with greater reliance on evaluation results for evidence-based decision making. The researchers draw on their separate research findings to provide a critical review of the emergent issues in assessment developments and offer suggestions for future assessment methods and approaches situated in their particular contexts. We suggest that in the drive for efficiency in measurement, in order to show evidence of effectiveness in particular practices, that there is a tendency to look to what appear to be neat and tidy solutions. These kinds of approaches to solutions suggest that the problems are also straightforward, rather than complex and messy.
The complex policies and the innovations across these three contexts raise serious moral and political problems. We argue that, and illustrate how, the ways so called advancements, improvements and reform are driven by limited, and limiting, understandings of assessment – with concomitant consequences for curriculum and pedagogy. The papers in this session trace the ways views of the purposes of education play out through assessment practices. Within a political rhetoric calling for increased inclusion and raising achievement for all we document practices with the effects of growing exclusion. Finally, we provide examples of the ways a continuing focus on fundamental values such as equity and belonging provide sites of resistance to privileging goals of efficiency and effectiveness.
References
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