Many teachers in the UK teach and assess subjects outside their fields of expertise, for a range of reasons including teacher shortages; the growing popularity of interdisciplinary courses; and the emergence of qualifications not rooted within any particular subject disciplines, for example the Project Qualifications developed recently in England and Wales. Interdisciplinary courses and Project Qualifications are frequently designed to grant students the invaluable freedoms of choosing and exploring their personal fields of interests and also of developing personal styles of expression. However,teachers with different subject backgrounds may have different interpretations of assessment terms, leading to inconsistencies in judgements during assessment (Sadler, 1989). This is an international phenomenon, characteristic of a range of subjects, and independent of the local vernacular. Recently, a series of research studies in various European countries has confirmed that the background discipline of teachers and assessors affects their conceptualisation of good performance. Analysing students’ academic writing in the history of science in the United Kingdom, North (2005) found that ‘arts’ students received higher marks than ‘science’ students because the typical features of writing required by the arts (e.g. requiring careful expression and re-drafting, dealing with interpretations, balancing different opinions) were valued more by the assessors. In Norway, Dysthe, Engelsen and Lima (2007) also found significant, discipline-related differences among teacher-assessors of ‘soft’ disciplines (e.g. arts) and ‘hard’ disciplines (e.g. maths, sciences and engineering). Working in the Netherlands, Joosten-ten Brinke, Sluijsmans and Wim (2010, 71) found that the decision-making process is “identical for assessors in the same domain, but differs from those in different domains”, leading to differences in their understanding of the assessment criteria. These differences in interpretations may have implications for the reliability and for the validity of the outcomes of assessment and therefore bear a critical impact on the career prospects and identities of many individuals.
Stemming from the international literature, two research questions were addressed in this study:
1. Do teachers from different disciplines, such as in the humanities and in the sciences, have different understandings of common generic assessment terms such as ‘analyse’ and ‘evaluate’?
2. Do individual differences arise in interpreting the assessment terms?
The aims of the present study were to answer the above research questions by elucidating tacit, semantic understanding of educational assessment terms and by collecting and analysing evidence of any differences among subject experts with different subject specialisms.
