Mā te kimi ka kite, Mā te kite ka mōhio, Mā te mōhio ka mārama.
Seek and discover. Discover and know. Know and become enlightened.(Maori saying)
There are many examples from which we can learn as we rethink the purposes and practices of assessment. As the Education Council (2020) reminded us in its review of senior secondary pathways into work in Australia, we need to learn from those who are actually trying things out, ‘Demonstration projects need to have greater influence on the traditional core of how we measure educational success’.
Interrogating practices
At Rethinking Assessment (RA) in England, we have been exploring a number of questions to better understand the nature of the problems with which we are grappling, as we explore promising international demonstrations of what might be adopted in England. We have developed two sets of questions, one to do with knowledge and skills (see Table 5), and another relating to dispositions and skills (see Table 6).
Skills, as I have argued earlier, are the connective tissue between knowledge and dispositions.