The most important assessments that take place in a school building are seen by no-one. They take place inside the heads of students, all day long. Students assess what they do, say and produce, and decide what is good enough. These internal assessments govern how much they care, how hard they work, and how much they learn.
(Berger, Rugen and Woodfin)
A little over a decade ago, John Hattie published a ground-breaking book, Visible
Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta Analyses Relating to Achievement, (2008). It was remarkable in two ways. It dared to use the word ‘meta-analyses’, in a popular book for educators. More importantly, it lifted the lid on educational research for teachers across the world. In painstaking detail Hattie made the processes of learning visible, clear and actionable. For most people in education it was a gamechanger. A similar paradigm shift is now needed in assessment.
- We need to explore, in similarly nuanced and evidenced ways, the different ways in which we can use assessment to improve learning, and make these discussions visible to all, depending on the purpose we have in mind.
- We need to make clearer the kinds of dispositions and capabilities that we want all young people to acquire, and make visible the processes by which we evidence student progress in acquiring them.
There are already educators beginning to do just this at a grass roots level, such as Ron Berger and colleagues, in Expeditionary Learning schools in the USA, whose words begin this section. Building on earlier evidence We are not starting from scratch. In Australia a Review undertaken by Geoff Masters in 2013 argued for a fundamental rethink about the purpose of assessments, that they should be seen as having a single general purpose: to establish where learners are in their long-term progress, within a domain of learning at the time of assessment.
The purpose is not so much to judge as to understand. This unifying principle, which has potential benefits for learners, teachers and other educational decision makers, can be applied to assessments at all levels of decision making, from classrooms to cabinet rooms.
The Gordon Commission, on assessment in the USA, spoke similarly.
In our vision of the future of assessment, the improvement of learning is its central purpose. It functions in dynamic interaction with curriculum and instruction, which themselves have the improvement of learning as its central purpose. Decisions about the form and content of assessment are informed by a socio-cultural perspective of learning, curriculum and instruction and its results are used by both the teacher and the learner to guide future teaching and learning.