Assessment in Practice

Explorations in Identity, Culture, Policy and Inclusion

Alicia Curtin, Kevin Cahill, Kathy Hall, Dan O'Sullivan, Kamil Özerk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138832428
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000627466
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Assessment in Practice explores timely and important questions in relation to assessment. By examining the relationship between identity, culture, policy and inclusion, the book investigates the conflicted and fractured battleground of assessment, and challenges current and practiced understandings of assessment practice.

The authors encourage the reader to reconceptualise assessment as a sociocultural practice. Each chapter studies a key theme in the understanding of assessment policy and practice from a sociocultural perspective and provides questions to prompt reflection on the key assessment concepts outlined in the book. Using culture as both a lens and analytic tool, the chapters examine topics such as

• The social order of assessment, how assessment works in the world and how learning could be assessed
• Perspectives on social justice and assessment, with a particular focus on social class and other potential inequalities on the experiences of assessment for young people
• Discussions of ability and the assessment of students with special education needs as well as the role of inclusivity in assessment practice

Written by leading academics from University College Cork, the third volume in the successful Routledge Current Debates in Educational Psychology series is an essential read for researchers and postgraduate students in educational research and education psychology.

1

SETTING THE BOUNDARIES IN ASSESSMENT: INTERSECTIONS OF IDENTITY AND VALUE IN PERSONAL SPACES

Today Alex is getting his final year examination results. He feels a bit nervous, though you would not think it to look at him. As there is a half day today Alex has decided to come in his own clothes, black Adidas tracksuit bottoms, top and runners. His curly blonde hair is tied back tightly in a short ponytail as is required while he is on school grounds. His nose ring has had to be taken out for the return to school but small plasters hide his eyebrow and upper ear rings. Alex steps up and receives his envelope, and then takes his seat again, at a desk on his own at the back of the class. The speech begins. The principal congratulates them all on a job well done and teachers smile knowingly at certain students. Students smile back, and at each other, nervously turning the precious envelopes over and over in their hands. Rachel, the class nominated leader stands to make a presentation to the class teacher and thanks everyone in the small classroom for their help and support in completing the examinations.

Alex hits the send button on his mobile phone. Chloe had better be there at six. It was going to be a great party. With great precision and experience Alex carefully slides his mobile phone back up his jumper sleeve. The teachers did not care and for the most part ignored him anyway. He often wondered if they knew what he was doing under the cover of his jumper, he only needed a quick glance to read his messages and could type, send and save messages without ever taking his eyes off the teacher. Often he thought they did know, but were glad of the break, and as long as he was not getting in trouble, he was one less body to worry about. But the principal was different. He had challenged Alex on several occasions on dress, behaviour, manners, accessories… Alex did not want to have his mobile phone taken from him for two weeks. He would continue the conversation later.

The window. He hoped it would not rain. That could ruin the night they had planned to celebrate the results. The results. He looked at the white envelope that lay on the desk in front of him. Nobody expected him to pass. But imagine if…. Suddenly everyone is clapping. It is over. Some students tear open their envelopes and everyone is talking. Rachel is crying and is immediately surrounded by a number of teachers. Alex grabs his bag and envelope, shoves aside his chair and strolls out of the room without speaking to anyone.

Introduction

Wenger suggests that communities of practice can be understood

as shared histories of learning. Over time, such histories create discontinuities between those who have been participating and those who have not. These discontinuities are revealed by the learning involved in crossing them: moving from one practice to another can demand quite a transformation.

(Wenger, 1998, p. 103)

With this in mind this chapter begins our exploration of assessment with the reconceptualisation of learning and assessment within boundaries of practice. We take as our central focus young people such as Alex, introduced in the vignette, whose learning trajectories at one time or another intersect a particular academic assessment setting but who later move away from this setting. We explore how these young people position themselves in and negotiate value, boundaries and identities in a number of different formal and informal assessment settings. Considering the spatial and temporal aspects of these assessment settings through a particular emphasis on the Wengerian idea of boundaries we explore a sociocultural theorisation of assessment as a social practice within shared and mediated histories of learning. In this analysis we also consider the assessment identity of the assessor as a partner in each learning setting and the sociocultural act of assessment.

Boundaries are the spaces in practice where new ideas are developed and learning can take place. As individuals move between practices or develop competencies in particular practices they transform their identities and negotiate boundaries created as a result of shared practices. Wenger describes a boundary as a space in practice where ‘competence and experience tend to diverge: a boundary interaction is usually an experience of being exposed to a foreign competence’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 233). We believe that for many young people successful participation in assessment practice requires the crossing of boundaries within practices. We also believe that assessment as a setting and a practice in its own right challenges young people to take up positions in and cross over a number of boundaries in their practice of assessment to develop competencies in value-laden (assessment) enterprises.

Understanding assessment as a series of boundaries and spaces where individuals develop related identities and experience opens up assessment as a relational and creative space for ‘making up people’ (Hacking, 2006, p. 2). Hacking introduces this idea in his discussion of ‘the looping effect’ (Hacking, 2006, p. 2).

We think of kinds of people as given, as definite classes defined by definite properties. As we get to know more about these properties, we will be able to control, to help, to change or to emulate them better. But it is not quite like that. They are moving targets because our investigations interact with the targets themselves, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. That is the looping effect. Sometimes our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. That is making up people.

(Hacking, 2006, p. 2)

Applied to assessment, this concept of looping, investigations interacting with targets and making up people, offers many opportunities for a sociocultural theorisation of assessment embedded in shared spatial and socioculturally situated practices. We define assessment here as any practices which develop patterns of participation and subsequently contribute to pupils’ identities as learners and knowers in particular settings (Cowie, 2005). Within this definition relationships between learner, teacher, task and context play a central role in experiences of assessment and identity in assessment settings for all individuals involved. The consideration of these myriad relationships at the heart of assessment spaces and communities of practice is, for us, one of the central concerns of this book, as their complex and connected nature evidence the many ways in which testing and assessment construct or ‘make up’ the values, realities and individuals they claim to measure.

In this chapter we understand assessment as a spatial and value laden setting where nothing (knowledge, language, practice, task….) is neutral, stable or uncontested. We consider relationships between identity, learning and assessment as individuals negotiate boundaries (understood as learning assets) within and across communities of practice. Finally, we suggest the importance of understanding assessment practice presented in this chapter as temporally located, asking questions and offering implications for assessment practice.

Assessment as setting: a space for negotiating value

Mannion’s (2007) work reframing participation research as research about adult child relations in socio-spatial settings aligns with our thinking and suggests that relationships should be central to understanding participation in learning. Mannion explains that our current focus on young people’s voice in learning is present but in a way that values outcomes for adults as well as children and suggests that:

by addressing the spatial alongside the dialogical and intergenerational aspects of children’s participation as the main focus, we can begin to usefully move the discourse on children’s participation on. Reframing voice and participation research as the study of and in the spaces of the child adult relations is not only a better reflection of the lived experience of children and adults, but it opens up new important and fertile territory for this expanding field.

(Mannion, 2007, p. 406)

We believe a beginning focus on spatial, dialogical and intergenerational aspects of assessment, developed in this chapter, facilitates a deeper understanding of assessment a sociocultural space for the development of experience, learning and identity.

Nind, Curtin and Hall (2016) define space as providing:

interactive scripts, shared resources and points of intersection for teachers and learners. It has physical, social, temporal, experiential (and possibly virtual) dimensions…. Space is ‘not a receptacle, a vessel that can be filled and emptied of its contents … space exists only as it is inhabited – it is created by the act of occupancy’ (Buchanan 1992, p. 1).

(Nind, Curtin and Hall, 2016, p. 269)

Understanding space in this way as socially practiced places (Agnew, 2005) we can infer that these spaces are experienced differently at different times by their inhabitants. In our vignette presented at the beginning of this chapter we see some of the feelings Alex and Rachel experience as they negotiate boundary practices in relation to assessment. Receiving examination results recreates the classroom space as a setting where particular and differential assessment practices, emotions and experiences are writ large in current participation and reifications of practice.

Ivinson and Murphy (2003) explore in more detail this idea of classroom as a space and setting for learning and reveal how knowledge, social and gender values and identities become constructed in and through classroom practice and interaction. The relational nature of knowledge, identity, success and failure all become clearly visible as the teacher in this study recontextualises subject knowledge, pedagogy, task and feedback dependent on classroom setting and student gender. The authors conclude that the classroom itself is a social setting where experience is actively constructed through a range of social possibilities and constraints and where unfortunately, it is not appropriate for boys to write romance. This is because the boys in the study do not reconstruct romance in their writing in the style conventionally recognised by teachers, focusing more on romantic events rather than authentic feelings and emotions. As the work produced is not valued by the teacher or others in the assessment space as legitimate it is left to the side, passed over in favour of more suitable textual examples and not seen itself as an authentic text for assessment and development. In this study and, similar to the experiences of Alex in our vignette, this results in students devaluing of and simultaneous devaluation by academic assessment practices.

O’Sullivan (Minister for Education and Skills in Ireland, 2015) recognises this complicated relationship between assessment and value when she states in relation to current curricular and assessment reforms in Ireland:

In reality, what is assessed is valued. School-based assessment will promote a learning culture in schools …Assessment should assist students in the quality of their learning and not be regarded as the end point. Research shows that unless assessment changes, little else will.

(O’Sullivan, J. 2015, p. 1)

Most significant for us is O Sullivan’s assertion that our understanding of assessment needs to change before anything else (teaching, learning, pedagogy…) can. This speaks to the creative and recreative aspects of assessment practice. Assessing the individual in any context or setting assumes a shared understanding of what is valued and requires the creation of what is to be measured, how it is to be measured and what the outcome will mean. Thinking about assessment in this way as a creative space reveals its power in the shaping of identities and ultimately, learning for Alex, Rachel and the young people introduced throughout this chapter.

Considering these student experiences of assessment we need to ask questions about how each individual is positioned in relation to assessment within every unique assessment setting/moment. Who has access to what kinds of participation and knowledge and in what ways? What are the relationships between individuals, experiences, identity and assessment as they differentially engage in participation across a variety of assessment settings. Gee (2003) for example suggests that if ‘ two children are being assessed on something they have not had equivalent opportunities to learn, the assessment is unjust’ (Gee, 2003, p. 28).

There are times in our lives when assessment becomes problematic and requires close attention, for example for young people like Alex and Rachel in school or college examinations, but there are also times when learning and assessment work together, for example when through practice, trial and error in non-formal assessment settings a new skill is learnt. In every day and informal spaces for learning and assessment even when an individual fails to learn what has been set out, this does not mean that they fail to learn. That is to say every situation holds valuable opportunities for learning and identity development – value from the perspective of the learner/ individual as well as all those involved.

Within boundary spaces in these non-formal assessment and learning settings learning results from practice valued however not everyone has to value the same practice in the same way. Learning and knowledge are more fluid than in formal assessment contexts and individuals can choose to learn in a way that aligns with their past experiences and present identity trajectory. Non-formal assessments of learning opportune negotiation of what is valued in learning and assessment in ways formal settings do not.

In more formal academic assessment settings problems arise when what is learnt (or valued at an individual level) does not match what is valued or expected in a given situation. Within these fixed and more confined academic assessment spaces young people who fail to succeed in socially constructed and differentially valued practices are identified as failures – unable to complete the task at hand to the same level of ability as their peers. As Stobart (2008) makes clear these individual and contextual failures in particular tasks and ways of representing knowledge and experiencing assessment spaces become representational of the individual and over time come together to act as a metaphor for what a person can or cannot do.

A sociocultural understanding of assessment challenges this conception of testing which can reliably stand in and for an individual and provide a stable and true representation of an individual where they may be absent. In his sociocultural study of the learning biography of one young student McDermott argues that we can only ever learn for what is around us to be learnt, claiming success and failure as definitive of each other with failure understood ‘as an absence real as presence, and it requires its share of the children’ (McDermott, 1996, p. 295). For a much more detailed discussion of constructions of success, failure, ability and talent in learning and assessment see Hall, Curtin and Rutherford (2014).

From a sociocultural perspective formal and informal assessment settings do not measure individual ability, achievement or even potential, but rather evidence how individuals negotiate and mediate boundaries and relationships between learning, identity, task and context in different assessment settings. Lantolf (2000) suggests we can conceptualise this mediation as mediation by others, mediation by self through private speech, and mediation by artifacts (e.g. tasks and technology). Positioned very differently in relation to assessment by their own actions and the actions of those around them Alex and Rachel experience different opportunities and constraints in relation to their shared mediation of assessment practice and identity in one assessment moment outlined at the beginning of this chapter.

In assessment moments, such as the one shared by one community of practice presented as a vignette at the beginning of this chapter identity, space, values and practice intersect and transform in dynamic and social processes that change for an individual their understanding of assessment and learning. These changes occur as individuals negotiate boundaries o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: examining the social order of assessment
• 1. Setting the boundaries in assessment: intersections of identity and value in personal spaces
• 2. Assessment as public practice: international aspects of assessment and accountability
• 3. Cultural scripts of assessment for practice: predictability, outcomes and life chances
• 4. Junior cycle reform: the negotiated nature of assessment policy in Ireland
• 5. Perspectives on social justice and assessment: testing, social class and opportunity to learn
• 6. The assessment of pupils with special educational needs: giving effect to the principles of inclusivity in practice
• Conclusion: disrupting normative thinking on assessment
• Bibliography
• Index