Ernest Spencer

More Than Good Intentions: Policy and Assessment for Learning in Scotland

The major challenge in Scotland’s long history of well-intentioned policy has always been implementation, in particular the realisation of a constructive and effective relationship across research, policy, and practice. Scottish experience provides a basis for radical changes, of potential international significance, in assessment policies to ensure better practical orientation to learning. The chapter considers critically the relationship between assessment policy rhetoric in the Curriculum for Excellence (for students aged 3–15) and provision of practical guidance and professional learning opportunities. It draws on understanding of what matters in the process of change gained from previous Scottish experience in the Assessment is for Learning programme. Evidence from a study of early Curriculum for Excellence assessment practice, Assessment at Transition, shows how the design, findings, and conduct of that project have led to some collaborative action by researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to make effective implementation of key assessment policy intentions more likely, despite the inadequacy of the support originally provided. The argument then moves beyond steps to help the implementation of current Scottish policy by proposing a number of major changes to the purposes and content of typical ‘traditional’ assessment policies and practices not only in Scotland but in many countries.

Special issue on assessment for learning

The inter-connectedness of curriculum, assessment and pedagogy is a central theme for this journal; yet any real sense of their connectedness in practice seems a distant dream at times. All too often, curricula are designed without sufficient consideration being given to their realisation, either to what young people might learn (and how learning might be discerned) or to how new curricula might be made real in schools and classrooms. The articles in this special issue focus on assessment and the challenge of keeping a focus on learning in differing curricula and different political and policy environments in various countries. Assessment for learning is an international phenomenon. The tension between the primary purpose of assessment, to support learning and the use of assessment data for a variety of other purposes is contentious internationally. Baird, Newton, Stobart, Hopfenbeck, and Steen-Utheim (2014, p. 4) remind us of the neo-liberal genesis of this tension and the economic competition it has generated among countries to measure the extent to which they have the ‘most and best knowledge workers’. The pressure that this puts on education systems has been evident for some time. Hanson (2000) postulated that there could come a point where the signifier, the assessment, would be of greater importance than the signified, the learning. In some societies, we may not be far from that position. The intention of this special issue is to counteract a view of assessment as the signifier, as what matters, and to focus on what assessment should signify, learning and the potential for assessment to enable and enhance it (Assessment for Learning) . In this context, learning relates to the vision of what it is to be an educated person in a given country. Increasingly, international curricula go beyond statements of knowledge and include, for example, the ability to apply knowledge and solve problems and the development of confidence and independent thinking in individual learners and among groups of learners. Often such outcomes depend on the nature of the learning, teaching and assessment activities through which the curriculum is experienced. Curriculum design and enactment that pay insufficient attention to learning put at risk what really matters in that curriculum. Attention has to be paid to how the learning of young people will be discerned, how the extent of teachers’ understanding of the curriculum and their realisation of that curriculum in practice should be monitored, and how, why and in what ways society might hold education to account. Each of these factors will have an impact on curriculum enactment. Yet, we have no unified theory