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What is assessment for? And how might we reconcile the competing demands upon assessment in the future?

Views on assessment are at the heart of divisions in education, with assessment for learning versus assessment of learning one of the main issues. Politicians need assessment to give some substance to their arguments about funding. Universities need data for selection purposes. Schools need assessment to validate what they are doing. Society needs assessment in order to be reassured that values are being transmitted. Employers need assessment to ensure that young people will have the skills necessary to work productively in business. Above all, students need assessment in order to see where they are going on their learning journey.

A way to reconcile these seemingly conflicting demands is urgently required.

For most people the assessment debate is rehearsed each August when the GCSE and A-level results are published. Newspaper commentators have a touching faith in the accuracy of the assessments. Standards, it is always observed, are not what they were! This year’s Education Briefing Book from the Institute of Directors looked at assessment in business terms and noted that in “the 1997-98 to 2005-06 period education spending rose by 49% in real terms, whilst the GCSE pass rate increased by 12.9 percentage points – a threefold increase in expenditure growth produced almost no acceleration in performance”. They also note that 49% of IoD members thought the quality of education had got worse. This widely held belief that standards are deteriorating, and that we need to hold on to GCSE and A-level, makes the acceptance of radical assessment change difficult.

Public confidence in the GCSE and A-level system is so important to the government that in September 2007 Education Secretary Ed Balls split the functions of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which currently sets the National Curriculum, sets tests and regulates exams. The exam system in England is now to be put in the hands of an independent watchdog to counter the annual criticism that GCSEs and A-levels are getting easier. However, this continues to focus the QCA’s efforts on centralised methods of assessment, rather than ones which are more learner-based.

The educational community has its own criticisms of assessment. Tony Wheeler, Senior Research Fellow at TERU (Technology Education Research Unit), Goldsmiths, London University, argues: “We have not clarified why we are doing the assessment and we are not honest about why we are doing the assessment; we are provided with a set mechanism and a method that does not guarantee reliability or validity… The purpose of assessment has become an accounting and auditing mechanism to keep schools and teachers in check. We are not testing the students any more; we are testing the schools and the management system in order that politicians can protect themselves… It is about schools, finance, management and politics.”

A Demos document, ‘Beyond Measure: Why educational assessment is failing the test’, although written in 2003, outlines some of the assessment issues lucidly and thoroughly. Demos associate Paul Skidmore wrote: “By improving and certifying ability to learn as well as knowledge and understanding, it would allow the assessment and qualifications system to be reshaped to serve the key strategic function of school-age education in the twenty-first century.”

The submissions to the Parliamentary Education and Skills Select Committee’s enquiry into testing and assessment illustrate how diverse the views on 21st century learning and assessment are. Schools rail against the constriction. Some exam boards speak for the status quo. Professors Black and Wiliam, at the forefront of assessment reform, state: “Our current educational assessments are not just ineffective - they are preventing us from providing high quality education for school students, and preventing schools from producing young people with the flexible skills that will be needed in the 21st century. This is because our assessments started from the idea that the primary purpose of educational assessment is selecting and certifying the achievement of individuals (ie summative assessment) - and have tried to make assessments originally designed for this purpose also provide information with which educational institutions can be made accountable (evaluative assessment). Educational assessment has thus become divorced from learning, and the huge contribution that assessment can make to learning (ie formative assessment) has been largely lost.”

Questioning the whole basis of conventional assessment, Professor Stephen Heppell points out that it will always be easy to fake assessment products. “Look at www.instant-degrees.net or even www.wageslips4u.co.uk for example. The ‘bit of paper’ approach is dead in the water. What employers want to see is a track record of work, properly narrated and evidenced - with comments from peers and parents and teachers. You can't - won't even - be able to fake that. So in the end these portfolio approaches will trump exams anyway. On eBay, no one cares if you have an MBA. They just judge you by your track record.”

While the academic and political debate on assessment rages on, many schools and universities are already exploring new approaches to assessment – both in terms of curriculum innovation and by exploring the role technology can play in tackling these issues.

RSA’s Opening Minds has a strong influence on assessment at Grange Primary School in Nottingham. Headteacher Richard Gerver aligned his work with Opening Minds because it suited the way the school was already working. “Education is about more than just academic learning and exams. It's about life and learning skills. Everything we have designed focuses on equipping them as fully as possible for the 21st century. We are not interested in SATS or academic performance as the ultimate aim of what we do. The main question is: what kind of people do we want our children to be when they leave us? Of course that encapsulates academic performance and skills.”

Every Friday skills are taught under the heading of the Grangeton Project. A number of courses are offered: journalism, street dance, rock dance, health and fitness, beauty therapy, chess, basic computer skills, money management and German, among others.

Each course leader devises five skills related to their planned workshop, and assesses the children against those five key skills. In hairdressing it could be anything from how to comb hair properly to creating a complex plait, or doing a shampoo and blow dry.

Observation, judgement of performance and feedback is done as the children are working. At the end of each six-week block each child receives a certificate of participation detailing which of the skills they have achieved. This is entered into their career entry profiles. “By the time they reach Year 6 there is a huge catalogue of the skills they have achieved.”

Technology may have an important role to play in developing different approaches to assessment. Project e-scape at Goldsmith’s College offers one way forward for GCSE-type assessments. Richard Kimbell has developed ways of assessing GCSE design and technology with short classroom tasks which assess students’ ability to create, prototype, evaluate and communicate a solution to a design challenge. Students work individually and in groups to create a design. Each student has a handheld PDA which enables them to create videos, stills, written documents, sketches and audio recordings, and all this material is merged into a portfolio which is eventually loaded onto a website to be assessed. By comparing students’ work to their peers’, judges are able to use rankings rather than arbitrary standards, as well as judging students on their skills and ability to learn, rather than just knowledge. This project has been so successful that it has been taken up by exam board Edexcel.

Martin Ripley, a leading authority on e-assessment, is concerned that technology used in assessment should be simple. He particularly admires Wireless Generation, a North American company which provides wireless assessment services to schools. “They… take the sting out of the administration. The assessment is done on a PDA by the teacher, they have condensed the assessment down into one minute per week per child. When the teacher docks the PDA it immediately gives the teacher feedback on the child’s trajectory. It can start to say very clever things because it is referencing a massive database. It is assessment that is smart, simple and with rich results.” Assessment this straightforward does stand a chance of becoming embedded in the work of teachers, learners and schools.

Skidmore in 2003 argued for teacher assessments on a practical level. “It would enable assessment for summative purposes to be both more valid and more reliable. By re-emphasising the robustness of assessments carried out in classrooms and schools, it would reduce the logistical complexity of the assessment system and its dependence on an over-stretched, centralised external marking process, while simultaneously increasing its transparency.”

What all these initiatives have in common is a growing realisation that the conventional methods of assessment are inadequate if we are to encourage the development of a range of different skills and competencies amongst students, rather than just the acquisition of subject content knowledge. Gareth Mills, Head of Futures and Innovations at QCA is exploring how different approaches to curriculum and assessment might be developed and supported at a national level by QCA:

“QCA has been looking at ways that we can make our curriculum fit for the 21st century. A key thing is that we must increase our focus on skills and competencies. There is unanimity on that from employers and headteachers. We want to create self-managers, students being independent, creative, innovative, enterprising, reflecting on learning, learning to learn. The curriculum is under three main headings: what are we trying to achieve; how do we organise learning; how well are we achieving the aims? We don’t start from the subjects; we start from our aims of creating successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens.”

This is a new era at QCA with few certainties, but what we can be certain about is that “curriculum development is the core business of a school,” asserts Mills. Rethinking assessment and getting beyond the current debates will be an essential part of that.

Links

Demos: www.demos.co.uk/publications/beyondmeasure
IoD: press.iod.com/newsdetails
Project e-scape: www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/teru/projectinfo.php?projectName=projectescape
Wireless Generation: www.wirelessgeneration.com
Child Power: Keys to the new learning of the digital century. Seymour Papert: www.papert.org/articles/Childpower.html
The Education and Skills Select Committee inquiry into testing and assessment: www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmeduski/memo/
test&ass/contents.htm
Grange Primary School: www.grange.derbyshire.sch.uk/grangeton1b.htm
National Curriculum: curriculum.qca.org.uk

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