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Chapter 1: The impact of formal assessment procedures on teaching and learning in art and design in secondary schools
Rachel Mason and John Steers
Background: The context for GCSE and changes over time
The introduction in the mid-1980s of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) marked the beginning of the âreformsâ that have continued unabated to the present time â not that the introduction of the GCSE was a rushed affair. The initial proposals to combine the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (GCE âOâ Level) and the Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) examinations dated back at least to the days of the Schools Council and Prime Minister James Callaghanâs seminal lecture at Ruskin College Oxford in 1976. The new examination was aimed principally at the top 60 percentile of the 16+ ability range although, in the case of art and design, the range was often much wider.
The GCSE examinations were welcome and overdue, marking the end of the perceived need for many art teachers to âdouble enterâ more able students for both examinations. Moreover, the rationale for the introduction of the GCSE was clear enough: the GCE/CSE system was incompatible with comprehensive education and, according to Her Majestyâs Inspectors of Schools (HMI), work in secondary schools was dominated by examinations which, in their view, tended to govern the type and length of classroom activities. The reliability of inter-examination board standards then, as now, was considered questionable, so the new GCSE was administered by just four regional examining groups in England, one examination board in Northern Ireland and another in Wales. At the core of the proposals was the sensible aim to establish common national assessment criteria for all syllabuses and assessment procedures, to ensure that all syllabuses with the same subject title had sufficient content in common, and that all boards applied the same performance standards to the award of grades.
The members of the Secondary Examinations Council (SEC) GCSE Grade Criteria Working Party for Art & Design1 recognized that the key to the whole exercise was how to define candidatesâ achievements through explicit criteria while not overly restricting the methods by which they might be achieved. The working party accepted that this approach involved many compromises. These included tacit agreement that it simply may not be possible adequately or equally to assess all curriculum objectives because the evidence for some of them may be too ephemeral to be valid. Lengthy consideration of the aims of art and design subsequently expressed in the GCSE National Criteria led to the identification of three equally weighted, closely interdependent and interrelated domains:
a Conceptual Domain concerned with the formation and development of ideas and concepts;
a Productive Domain concerned with the abilities to select, control and use the formal and technical aspects of art and design in the realization of ideas, feelings and intentions; and
a Critical and Contextual Domain concerned with those aspects of art and design which enable candidates to express ideas and insights which reflect a developing awareness of their own work and that of others.
2 Of course, this model is only one among many that could have been adopted and might have been equally coherent, but its conceptualization marked a significant step forward. As the working party struggled to develop the detailed criteria, a number of important issues emerged and significant lessons were learned. For example, the dangers of using adjectives such as âsimpleâ or âsophisticatedâ in criterion statements because these kinds of words are ambiguous and open to diverse interpretations â a lesson that often has been overlooked in the interim as they increasingly find their way back into the assessment criteria lexicon.
In retrospect, the introduction of grade criteria was seminal in a number of ways. It can now be seen as the thin end of a wedge leading towards a state in which, as Eisner warns:
From the mid-1980s, through successive agencies such as the School Curriculum Development Committee (SCDC), the National Curriculum Council (NCC), the School Examinations Council (SEC), the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC), the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA), to the present Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), governments have sought once and for all to ânail the jelly to the wallâ through repeated attempts to define the content, aims, objectives, assessment parameters and criteria for all subjects, including art and design. But analysis of the documentation suggests that there has been little new thinking and in reality much of this relentless process has consisted of âre-packagingâ (repeated editing and prĂ©cis) of previous documents to make them fit the common template currently favoured for all curriculum subjects. Thus the publication of Curriculum 2000 and the latest specifications for qualifications give the impression that all questions about what constitutes good practice in schools have been resolved. However, history is likely to prove that this is just an illusion â before long another perceived change of circumstances or belated admission of inherent problems are likely to require a further round of tinkering and reductionism.
Orthodoxy
For many years concerns have been expressed about an increasing orthodoxy of approach in art and design education as a consequence of the examination system. As early as 1982, Eddie Price, an experienced chief examiner and chair of the Schools Council 16+ art sub committee, expressed concerns about the wash back of the examination system on classroom practice and prophesied problems with standardized assessment criteria:
In 1999, Norman Binch, one-time chair of the art and design panel of the largest examination board, reflected on how the GCSE, with its strong emphasis on âprocessâ, influenced the style of work throughout secondary schools. He claimed that this frequently led to a single, linear classroom methodology where:
This approach Binch describes has proved very reliable over the years producing âsafeâ work that of its kind is often of undeniably high technical quality and on which teachers can depend for the award of good grades by the examination boards. Today the examination pressures in secondary schools are overwhelming and influence classroom practice not only at key stage 4 (15- to 16-year-olds) but throughout key stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds). In our âhigh stakesâ education system it should be no surprise that teachers are adept at finding effective prescriptions for their students to follow that raise examination scores and, in turn, satisfy the various demands of league tables, inspection and threshold payments (a form of payment by results). But whether such a dominant conventional approach encourages real creativity and is in the best interests of pupils may be another matter.
How has this state of affairs come about? Since the early 1980s syllabuses have provided more and more detailed guidance. Typically, in the earlier generic GCE or CSE syllabuses, a few paragraphs sufficed to outline the content of an art and design examination course, but by 1999 separate art and design syllabuses of 20-40 pages were the norm. Twenty years ago syllabuses rarely contained specific aims, objectives, subject content or mark schemes â principally because the GCE âOâ level examinations generally were externally marked and it was not thought necessary to provide such information for teachers or candidates. There were marked differences between syllabuses but over time an ever-greater conformity between examinations boards/awarding bodies has developed, no doubt as a consequence of requirements to comply with the increasingly rigid examination specifications of the QCA and its various antecedents.
The earlier syllabuses included a wide range of optional papers with a focus in particular on fine art, design and craft skills; for example, lettering, photography, printmaking, pottery, theatre design and mural design. The number of students opting to pursue specialisms such as these in depth appears in general to have diminished, partly as a consequence of the decision to introduce the âunendorsedâ art and design examination and partly by the ârationalizationâ of standard titles for endorsed papers.6 By the end of the twentieth century the overwhelming majority of art and design candidates were entered for unendorsed papers although much of the work submitted took the relatively narrow form of drawing and painting.7 It is clear that one consequence of the changes that have taken place has been that specialisms have been lost in many schools along with the real choice of studying a particular aspect of art and design in depth or following a more general course of study.
Not all the changes have had a negative impact. Positive outcomes include more guidance for students and teachers, improved student motivation and more examination time. For example, there has been a move away from question papers offering little more than one-word âstarting pointsâ or instructions to examination supervisors about how to set up a still-life group or pose a model. Instead more recent question papers favour formats that offer more support for candidates, for example, a detailed design brief. Another recent approach is to provide a âquestion paperâ with a single common theme covering a wide range of art, craft and design activities that includes a long, discursive discussion of ideas candidates might wish to develop. Clearly, the intention is to motivate students to respond as creatively as possible to the required âterminal testâ.8 Twenty years ago the time allocated for a terminal examination was often short, typically two to three hours in which to produce a drawing or composition. The time for all the examining groups is now around ten hours and there is a common pattern of question papers being issued to candidates some weeks in advance of the terminal examination in order to give them opportunity to research and plan their work.
Of particular significance is the marked trend away from an optional, formal art and design history element towards a general requirement for a âcritical an...
