by John Yandell, Institute of Education
I want to explore five aspects or strands of the
way in which we tend to think about assessment.
In calling these strands myths, I am suggesting two
things. First, that they are both powerful and deeply embedded in our
assumptions about assessment: they have become, in other words, common
sense. Second, that they are, in
important ways, untrue and unhelpful, obstacles that make it harder for us to
arrive at more accurate and adequate understandings of assessment.
I should make it clear, too, that what I mean by
assessment here is not formative assessment or assessment for learning, but the regimes of high-stakes, summative
assessment that figure so prominently in the landscape of schooling in this
country.
The effect of high-stakes assessment in distorting
and impeding education has a history, more or less as long as the history of
state education itself. In 1911, Edmond Holmes, an HMI who had resigned in
disgust from the inspectorate, wrote a wonderful little book entitled What is and what might be? The first half of the book speaks directly to
us across the intervening century. Holmes describes a system in which teachers
spoon-feed their pupils, a system in which there is precious little room for
genuine learning to take place:
Why is the teacher so ready to do everything (or
nearly everything) for the children whom he professes to educate? One obvious answer to this question is that
for a third of a century (1862-1895) … "My Lords" required their
inspectors to examine every child in every elementary school in England on a
syllabus which was binding on all schools alike. In doing this, they put a bit
into the mouth of the teacher and drove him, at their pleasure, in this
direction and that. And what they did to him they compelled him to do to the
child (Holmes 1911: 7).
Holmes identifies the
effects of a centralised curriculum, enforced through testing and through
inspection. Within such a system, there
is no space for creativity, no space for dialogue, no space to explore and
exploit the interests and experiences that the learners bring with them. Schooling is a transmission process, driven
by fear.
What is also significant
about Holmes’s account, though, is that he is writing sixteen years after the
ending of the system of payment by results.
What Holmes understood, because he had seen the evidence in the
elementary schools he had visited across the country, was that the pernicious
effects of such systems of control lived on after the systems themselves had
been abandoned.
Within this system, Holmes
identified the crucial effect of assessment:
How did the belief that a formal examination is a worthy end for teacher
and child to aim at, and an adequate test of success in teaching and in
learning, come to establish itself in this country? And not in this country
only, but in the whole Western world? In every Western country that is
progressive and "up to date," ... the examination system controls
education, and in doing so arrests the self-development of the child, and
therefore strangles his inward growth.
What is the explanation of this significant fact? .... The Western belief in the efficacy of
examinations is a symptom of a widespread and deep-seated tendency – the
tendency to judge according to the appearance of things, to attach supreme
importance to visible "results," to measure inward worth by outward
standards, to estimate progress in terms of what the "world" reveres
as "success" (Holmes 1911: 8-9).
Holmes was describing an education system in which
the tail of assessment wagged the dog of learning. How familiar.
Myth 1: learning is linear
Since the imposition, twenty years ago, of the
National Curriculum and its attendant levels and level descriptors, it has
become increasingly hard to challenge the assumption that learning happens in
predictable, identifiable and incremental stages. Increasingly, too, the levels of the National
Curriculum are broken down into sub-levels, in an attempt to describe ever more
precisely the progress that learners have made – and also to set ever more
precise targets for their future progress. The attainment of literacy or
numeracy becomes inextricably associated with achieving a level four before the
end of primary education, while press and politicians are quick to make
headlines with the assumption that those who have not been awarded a level four
are therefore illiterate, innumerate.
The problem with all of this is that it is not
true. At best, the National Curriculum
level descriptors are an attempt to describe what progression in a subject
might look like. But learning itself is a much messier, more complicated
business than the linear scale of levels or GCSE grades would suggest.
What happens day by day in the classroom depends on
factors other than the learners’ existing or target levels: it depends on their
interests and experiences beyond school, and whether they can make connections
between these interests and experiences and the school curriculum. It depends on the learners’ motivation.
Even within subjects, such as maths, where learning
seems more easily accommodated to the paradigm of linear progression, learners’
understanding of, say, number can be at a markedly different stage of
development from their understanding of shape, space and measure.
Within subjects such as English, where development
more obviously involves social and emotional aspects alongside intellectual
processes, and where learners’ development as speakers and listeners does not
bear any simple or constant relationship to their development as readers and
writers, the attempt to place their progress at a single point on a single
linear scale is neither meaningful nor educationally justifiable.
What this amounts to is a bad case of reification,
more infectious and far more damaging than swine flu: levels that were, at
most, ways of gesturing broadly at progression have been transformed under the
pressure of particular forms of accountability into things, as if levels had
the same solidity and materiality as, say a child’s shoe size.
So one encounters with wearying regularity children
who announce that they “are” a level six, or a level three (the former with
pride verging on smugness, the latter with an air of resignation, a meek
acceptance that literacy, or even learning, is not really their thing).
Even more worryingly, the reification process has
affected the way that teachers talk about their pupils – so “she’s a level
five” or “he’s a level four” are now not so much shorthand expressions, standing
for more complicated pictures of a learner’s development, as bald statements of
fact.
Myth 2: learning is context-independent
The idea that learning happens in a vacuum, as it
were, and hence that learning can be measured in isolation from the context in
which it happened, is closely linked to the myth of linearity. It is another aspect of the same reductive
approach to learning, an approach that seeks to isolate sub-skills and then
assess whether the sub-skill has been acquired without any reference to the
contexts in which such skills might be used and developed.
Once again, it is an attempt to sidestep the messy
contingencies of real learning, substituting in its place the thin abstractions
of the easily transmitted and easily measured.
Always and everywhere, classrooms are populated by
real people with particular histories, experiences, cultures. Learning involves these people interacting
with each other and with particular materials – with particular problems,
particular texts, particular resources.
Myth 3: learning is individual
Deeply implicated in the history of schooling in
this country is the assumption that learning is the property of an individual,
that learning happens inside a single learner’s head. It is a myth that is nurtured by, and helps
to sustain, the sense of self that is central to bourgeois culture and
values. Plagiarism, the Manichean other
of intellectual property, is the cardinal sin within the religion of schooling
precisely because it entails a transgression of this article of faith, learning
as the property of the individual.
With glorious circularity, we know that learning is
individual because the assessment regimes constantly demonstrate that this is
the case. Assessment, predicated on the
commonsense assumption that learning happens in an individual’s head, proceeds
to provide opportunities for the individual to demonstrate this learning, in
circumstances – such as the exam hall – where normal human interactions are
absolutely forbidden, and then offers conclusive proof of the validity of the
procedure by arriving at differential assessments for different individuals: to
one a level five, to another a grade A, and so on.
It is in such routines of assessment that the role
of education as a sorting mechanism becomes most obvious. Assessment separates sheep from goats,
high-fliers from also-rans, leaders of men from hewers of wood. It underpins the notion of meritocracy and it
sustains the illusion that social justice can be achieved through social
mobility.
The myth of the isolated individual, the learner as
examination candidate, filters out all that we know about the reality of
distributed learning, all we know about learners as irreducibly social beings,
situated in history and in culture.
Myth 4: the assessment of learning is objective and
reliable
The dominant discourses of schooling are based on
the myth of reliable assessment. In the
creation of this myth, one of the things that happens is that assessment
processes assume a kind of autonomy, independent of human agency.
But assessment is always a social practice. It always involves the exercise of
judgement. It is always conducted for
specific purposes by particular people.
Only in the most trivial cases is assessment merely a matter of measuring. And reliability comes at a cost: the more
reliable a test, the less information it can provide about the breadth of a
child’s learning and development. There
is, in other words, an inverse relationship between reliability and validity
(Alexander 2010: 320-1).
Myth 5: high stakes assessment is vital for
accountability
The argument here is not over whether schools
should be accountable – of course they should – but over the role of testing in
achieving accountability. The whole machinery of National Curriculum levels and
sub-levels does not make it easier for parents and carers to find out about
their children’s progress; it is a barrier in the way of communication between
teachers and parents, a professionalist jargon impenetrable to most people.
The myth that national assessment frameworks
introduced accountability ignores other forms of accountability such as
parents’ evenings and school reports. To
make this statement is not to claim that such systems of accountability are
perfect – they aren’t – but the imposition of high-stakes testing has done
nothing to address their shortcomings.
As the Cambridge Primary Review reminds us, parents and carers want to
know, among other things, whether their children are happy (Alexander 2010:
316). And there is not, as yet, a National Curriculum level for happiness.
There is also a massive problem in conflating the
assessment of individual learners with judgements about the effectiveness of
teachers, schools or local authorities.
Most obviously, using aggregated test data as an accountability measure
tends to leave much that is relevant out of the account: it ignores the
particular contexts of schools and their communities, and it ignores all the
other aspects of a school’s work that lie beyond the preparation of pupils for
high-stakes tests.
Worse than this, such accountability measures
always and inevitably distort schools’ and teachers’ priorities, encouraging an
exclusive focus on the curricular areas that are to be tested, on those aspects
of a subject that are to be tested (reading and writing rather than speaking
and listening, say), on the students who lie at the threshold of success (the
3a/4c pupils, the C/D borderlines, and so on).
To conclude, I want to return to Edmond Holmes’s
picture of schooling a hundred years ago.
Two aspects of this picture seem salient to me – and horribly
contemporary. First, that education has
become a commodity: children and their learning are reduced to test scores,
mere units of analysis. The process is
epitomised by the new verb meaning, to
level: this is the process that
teachers are engaged in, a process that flattens and renders invisible all that
is distinctive, all that is interesting, about real learners.
Second, that what the system values – and demands –
of all its participants, teachers and pupils alike, is compliance – neither
originality nor creativity, neither judgement nor responsiveness to individual
circumstance, neither questioning nor imagination, but mere mechanical
compliance.
Except, of course, this is not a conclusion, simply
a diagnosis. For us, as for Edmond
Holmes, the task is not just to see what is, but to begin to envisage, and to
work towards, what might be.
References
Alexander, R., ed. (2010) Children, their World, their Education:
final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, London
& New York: Routledge.
Brooks, R., & Tough, S.
(2006) Assessment and Testing: Making
space for teaching and learning, London: IPPR.
Holmes, E. (1911) What is and what might be, London:
Constable.
A longer version of this
paper will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal, Changing English.
