This study examines how students perceive and enact their voice in assessment across two upper-secondary schools in Iceland. Through dialogism, drawing on Bakhtin's distinction between monologic and dialogic discourse, it asks whether students function as recipients of verdicts or as participants in meaning-making about their learning. The research question: How do students experience and navigate their voice in assessment practices across two contrasting upper-secondary school contexts? 

Assessment for learning (AfL) foregrounds formative practices: clarifying learning intentions, eliciting evidence, providing feedback that moves learners forward (Wiliam & Thompson, 2007). Yet research shows that AfL implementation often becomes technical and superficial, reducing students to passive recipients of teacher judgments (Swaffield, 2011; Klenowski, 2009).  

Cook-Sather (2006) argues that student voice is not merely about students speaking. It requires their perspectives being present and carrying power. Voice demands both opportunity to speak and conditions under which speech is taken seriously. Without such conditions, participation becomes tokenism.  

Bakhtin's (1981) monologism describes discourse presenting a single authoritative perspective as final truth, closing down alternative meanings. In assessment, monologic practices position grades and feedback as endpoints with no space for student response. Dialogism assumes that meaning emerges through meetings of multiple voices. Grades and feedback become starting points for conversation, not endpoints. 

This extends Swaffield's (2011) reminder that assessment derives from the Latin assidere—to sit beside. The teacher sits with students to understand how they learn (Marshall & Drummond, 2006). Feedback is not transmission but exchange. To speak, for Bakhtin (1986), means anticipating an answer that shapes assessment outcomes. 

When assessment is dialogic, students reveal confusion, take risks, seek help. Their contributions matter. When assessment is monologic, students perform compliance (Torrance, 2007). They seek approval from others instead of developing their own evaluative capacity. Torrance warns that students become consumers of learning objectives rather than active agents in learning can undermine the spirit of AfL, which is to support learner autonomy. 

We also examine how assessment interacts with autonomy. Upper-secondary schools increasingly offer flexibility, different formats, task choices. Such flexibility lets students demonstrate competence in multiple ways. But it demands self-regulation (Zimmerman, 2002). Without dialogic support, flexibility produces a paradox: students choose, but nobody responds to those choices as if they matter. 

Drawing on dialogism and student voice, we analyse how pedagogical context shapes whether voice functions as participation or compliance. Rather than treating inclusion as a property of instruments, we examine it as a quality of a ongoing dialogue in the classroom.  

This qualitative case study examined student experiences of assessment in two upper-secondary schools in Iceland. The schools were selected to represent contrasting approaches within the same national system. One has developed project-based teaching and flexible assessment, while the other follows conventional structures but has engaged in formative assessment development. Both schools offer academic and vocational programmes and serve students from varied backgrounds. This contrast allows analysis of how pedagogical context shapes student voice within shared policy frameworks. Data were collected through focus group interviews. Focus groups were chosen because peer interaction can reveal how students talk about and make sense of assessment together (Braun & Clarke, 2013). One focus group of six to eight students was conducted at each school. Participants were recruited through teachers and represented different study programmes. Interviews lasted approximately 60 minutes and were conducted in Icelandic by the authors. Questions explored how students experience grades and feedback, how they perceive communication about assessment, and whether they feel their voice matters in assessment decisions. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019, 2021). This approach treats themes not as entities waiting to be discovered but as patterns constructed through the researcher's active engagement with what participants said. Analysis moved through phases: familiarization, initial coding, constructing candidate themes, reviewing against data, and defining final themes. The dialogic framework informed but did not predetermine coding. We remained open to patterns that complicated or extended our expectations.

Findings: Students described a spectrum where assessment either functioned as an authoritative "verdict" that silenced participation, or as a starting point for conversation that invited meaning-making. The findings indicate that trust is a prerequisite for students to "act", to take intellectual risks and reveal uncertainty. Finally, the study suggests that flexibility alone does not guarantee autonomy; without dialogic support, students often drifted toward the "path of least resistance" rather than engaging in deep learning Conclusion: This study speaks to the conference theme: Whose knowing counts? In assessment, this question becomes concrete. Whose voice carries authority when learning is evaluated? Under what conditions can students contribute to meaning-making about their own progress, rather than simply receiving verdicts? The two schools operate under the same national curriculum. Yet they have developed different assessment cultures, producing different conditions for student voice. Iceland's small system makes this visible. Shared policy frameworks generate different local practices. This dynamic is relevant across European contexts where competency-based curricula meet diverse school cultures, a tension increasingly documented as assessment reform spreads. Our findings suggest that student voice in assessment depends on whether assessment functions dialogically. When it does, students reveal uncertainty, ask questions, take risks. Their contributions shape what happens next. When assessment remains monologic, students perform compliance. They wait for verdicts. They stop speaking as learners and start speaking as grade-receivers.

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