Louise Hayward

Ruffling the calm of the ocean floor: merging practice, policy and research in assessment in Scotland

The formative Assessment for Learning proposals outlined by Black and Wiliam (e.g. Black et al., 2002) have been well publicised. Since 2002, in its Assessment is for Learning programme, the Scottish Executive Education Department (SEED) has been exploring ways of bringing research, policy and practice in assessment into closer alignment using research on both assessment and transformational change. This paper focuses on one project within Assessment Is for Learning, in which pilot primary and secondary schools across Scotland were encouraged to develop formative assessment approaches in classrooms. They were supported in this by researchers, curriculum developers and local and national policy‐makers. The paper examines the rationale and methods behind the enactment of formative assessment in these schools. It draws upon evidence provided by the interim and final reports of participating schools to draw conclusions about areas of success within the project and potential barriers to the projects future in its evolution from pilot to national programme.

Travelling towards change in assessment: Policy, practice and research in education

Whilst there is evidence of significant investment in policy-led initiatives to raise attainment in schools, there is rather less evidence of the positive impact of such initiatives. In this paper we explore stakeholder views of recent initiatives in assessment in Scotland in an attempt to discern the relationships between assessment policy, research and practice in schools. Against a background of major assessment initiatives and by drawing on data from two national consultations, the paper illustrates the complexities inherent in following advice for policy developments to begin from where people are now. Finally, the paper explores the possibility of a new assessment journey for researchers, teachers and policy-makers, one which acknowledges the complex process of community-based transformational change.

Assessment is learning: the preposition vanishes

Scotland, in common with many countries internationally, has been learning how to align ideas from research with policy and practice. This article considers what Scotland learned from large-scale evaluations of its Assessment is for Learning (AifL) programme and the extent to which this evidence was used to inform future learning within the national programme. More recently, the policy focus in Scotland has shifted to the creation of a new curriculum, Curriculum for Excellence, subsuming AifL. Merging curriculum and assessment innovations brought new challenges in the alignment of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Drawing on a Scottish Government-funded research project, Assessment at Transition, designed to identify and explore emerging gaps between practice in schools and local authorities and national curriculum and assessment policy aspirations, the article argues that assessment is learning and explores how formative approaches to evaluation at a national level might be used to prevent countries repeating past mistakes.

Engaging and Empowering Teachers in Innovative Assessment Practice

Increased recognition of the important role of assessment in learning has meant that assessment by teachers has taken on new importance in schools and indeed in education systems as a whole. External testing has forced schools to improve their performance and that of their students by striving for externally imposed targets and standards, resulting in a range of negative impacts. Assessment by teachers offers a complementary role to appropriately designed external testing, provided that the teachers involved are engaged and empowered. This chapter reports on the findings of the project entitled Analysis and Review of Innovations in Assessment project (ARIA), which set out to explore various initiatives associated with Assessment for Learning in the four countries of the UK. The project found that many initiatives in developing assessment by teachers are under-designed and there is uncertainty about defining quality in assessment practice. It also identified potentially successful approaches to professional learning and dissemination through a dynamic and complex process that requires commitment from, and empowerment of, teachers and appropriate support from policy-makers, researchers and educational support professionals.

Redefining Roles: university e-learning contributing to lifelong learning in a networked world?

Distance education enabled by e-learning is at the forefront of university participation in an increasingly connected world. Physical, temporal, cultural and educational borders are becoming both less rigid and less predictable than ever before. The authors suggest, in this article, that university distance e-learning could and should allow universities to make a major contribution to lifelong learning in this networked world. However, just as lifelong learning and distance e-learning are subject to multiple interpretations and realisations, the role that universities might play in contributing to global lifelong learning is currently far from clear. Both distance education, as a mode of learning and teaching, and lifelong learning, as an aspiration and a policy, bring issues pertaining to the roles and values of universities into sharp focus. On the fluid, unpredictable landscape of global higher education are traced the imperatives driving distance e-learning and lifelong learning in order to discern the redrawing of borders that appears to be emerging. The parallels between unsettled territories and unresolved tensions in distance e-learning and lifelong learning will be highlighted. The authors suggest that distance e-learning could enable lifelong learning and that lifelong learning, broadly interpreted, should be a cornerstone of university strategy and activity in a world that is increasingly networked.

Creating curricula: aims, knowledge, and control a special edition of the Curriculum Journal

The contributors build on this importance to suggest a rapprochement in the field around the idea of curriculum knowledge as both constructed and real. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Curriculum Journal.

Living with supercomplexity

David Lambert (1999) used the idea ‘supercomplexity’ when arguing for the need for geography teachers to engage in careful moral teaching to explore with young people ‘supercomplex’ environmental processes in a global world. Looking back, what seemed supercomplex then seems almost simple in comparison to the challenges global education now faces. In a previous edition of this journal, our editorial (Livingston, Hayward, Higgins, & Wyse, 2015) explored the role of education in a supercomplex world. The editorial framed the argument around Barnett’s (2015) contention that in a complex world although bombarded by facts, evidence, data and arguments, there are frameworks to help us handle them. In a supercomplex world nothing can be taken for granted and even our frames of understanding are contested and no longer feel secure. In 2015, only two years ago, it is doubtful that we understood the full implications of what that might mean for the world and for education in 2017. This current issue develops the theme of supercomplexity and features research in educational environments internationally: this is research to explore, research to inform and research to challenge. This issue brings together papers presenting research from researchers across four continents, Asia (Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Iran), Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), North America (Canada and the US) and Europe (Cyprus, Spain and Portugal). These researchers, in common with others across the world, are trying to build a better evidence base for action, to help to create the firmer ground that Barnett (2015) argues is shifting beneath our feet. The first paper in this issue explores tensions that lie in the boundaries between education, identity formation and politics. Set in the context of the Hong Kong civil disobedience campaign of September 2014, the Umbrella Movement, Fung and Lui examine teacher and student perceptions of the claim that the Liberal Studies curriculum was used as a political instrument to instigate students’ participation in the protest movement. Both teachers and students challenged this claim, arguing that teachers had maintained neutrality, even when dealing with politically sensitive topics. There was, however, a perception that the proposed reform of Liberal Studies by government was politically motivated and student and teacher views about an increase in the number of China related topics were divergent. The paper offers a fascinating insight into the potential for possible present and future roles for Liberal Studies, including a possible role in the democratisation of local society. At the other end of the continuum of research into the contribution of education, identity and society, the second paper explores the way in which school experiences impact on the lives of young adults. Entitled ‘Learning to live together. The contribution of school’, Pomar and Pinya, present findings from in-depth interviews with ex-students to identify the extent to which their future civic identities are influenced by their early

Multiple influences on curriculum decisions in a supercomplex world

Barnett (2015) argues that a supercomplex world is a world in which nothing can be taken for granted, where no frame of understanding or of action can be entertained with any security. He suggests that a complex world is one in which we are assailed by more facts, data, evidence, tasks and arguments than we can easily handle within current frameworks. By contrast he suggests that a supercomplex world is one in which the very frameworks by which we orient ourselves to the world are themselves contested. The curriculum provides a framework for learning and teaching, but in an increasingly supercomplex uncertain and unpredictable world, decisions about relevant curriculum content and processes of enactment in schools and classrooms are challenging and contested. A complex and interacting array of influences impact on curriculum decisions, including historical, ideological, cultural, political, economic, theoretical and pragmatic influences. This leads to multiple views and interpretations of curriculum content and processes. The authors of the articles in this issue from UK, Chile, China, America and the Netherlands discuss a number of these influences in relation to different topics (e.g. music education, higher order thinking skills, games and digital media, and technical and vocational education and training). Uncovering and making explicit the many influences on curriculum content and processes are difficult but necessary to enable critique and the development of a better understanding of their impact on curriculum decisions. Uncontested deep-rooted influences are likely to result in barriers to curriculum change at policy and practice levels and could account for the continuation of outdated views about curriculum, assessment and pedagogy. Barriers to curriculum innovation and changing practice are explored in different ways in each of the articles with some suggestions to challenge current practice and support curriculum development. In the first article, Robert Legg challenges the possibilities offered for curriculum change within pre-existing theoretical frameworks. He argues that the ideas from previous ‘waves’ of curriculum change in music education in the UK have maintained theoretical dominance and continue to influence current practice in schools. Legg makes the point that confusion about the meaning of music within education is an unresolved ideological debate which has led to a confusion of purpose amongst many teachers. While this point is made within the context of music, an ideological debate

Traditional school subjects versus progressive pedagogy

Traditional school subjects have been a feature in some countries’ school curricula for more than 150 years. If we were to include education in Ancient Greece, and particularly the curriculum of Plato’s Republic which placed music first and gymnastics second, then we could say that some traditional subjects have been a feature for more than 2000 years. In modern times the appropriateness of traditional subjects as a way of structuring a curriculum has faced repeated critique and defence. One of these critiques has been that learners’ thinking does not reflect the ways in which traditional subjects structure the knowledge in curricula. It is argued that thinking is more theme-focussed, drawing across multiple subjects, disciplines and areas of knowledge, in seeking understanding of any aspect that is the focus for learning. Another feature of the debates about how curricula should be structured has been the tendency for traditional subjects and their knowledge bases to be seen as important in relation to secondary education but their legitimacy contested in relation to early years and primary/elementary education. The contestation has resulted in alternatives to traditional school subjects being proposed: e.g. cross-curricular study; topic work as a more appropriate vehicle for holistic learning; and the organisation of whole curriculum into areas of learning rather than traditional subjects. Perhaps one of the most successful practical outcomes of organisation by broader areas of learning has been the curriculum of the International Baccalaureate (IB). Of course, one of the problems with the binary opposition of traditional subjects versus progressive pedagogy that we set up in the title to this editorial is just that, its binary nature, as the papers in this edition illustrate. Nearly all the papers have a curriculum subject focus, and there is an even split between papers focused on primary education and those focused on secondary education. Irrespective of the phase of education it appears that cross-cutting issues are in the end more important than the subjects of the curriculum that in most papers are the contexts for the research. The first of four papers that have secondary education as their focus addresses student choices of subjects, in preparation for the subjects they will be examined in. Drawing on the world-leading cohort study data, the Next Steps (formerly the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), Morag Henderson, Alice Sullivan, Jake Anders and Vanessa Moulton found that clear socio-economic, gender, ethnic and school-level differences in subjects chosen could not be accounted for prior attainment. This study contributes to the growing evidence that education systems struggle to address the societal inequalities that many people expect education to alleviate. The subject focuses for the second paper, contextualised in secondary education, are design and business. The focus of Andrew Withell and Neil Haigh’s study was partly teachers as researchers. An action research design was coupled with theories of critical realism to explore design and business processes. The thoughtful exploration of issues reflects many similar studies where the research is Close to Practice (CtP). CtP research is a subject for which in 2018 the British Educational Research Association (BERA) is to report findings

Reclaiming education: ‘fake news’, research and social justice

It feels like a sign of the times that, in 2017, dictionary publisher Collins named the term ‘fake news’ word of the year. Education has not been immune from its own forms of ‘fake news’. Of course, there are policies that are well informed, drawing evidence from research, policy and practice to offer high-quality frameworks to guide educational practice. However, all too often there is an international trend for policies to emerge where it is difficult to discern the underlying evidence base that has informed the thinking that lies behind the policy. On occasion there are neither footnotes nor a reference list to allow those interested to track the dependability of the policy or its guidance. Even when there is a reference list it may refer only to previous policy: a vicious circle of ideas that may or may not be dependable. And these same policies are intended to act as the basis for teachers’ practice with children and young people in schools and classrooms. We live in challenging times politically, economically and socially. These are times when dependable evidence matters more than ever. The articles in this edition employ a range of approaches to educational research but they share a number of common features: they are shaped by reason; they are explicit about the evidence base on which they draw, and they have been subjected to rigorous peer review. Articles such as these offer examples of the way in which research might make a contribution to challenging the world of educational ‘fake news’. In the opening article of this edition, on a topic that as editors we have pursued as part of our vision for the Curriculum Journal (see our Special Issue – Creating Curricula: Knowledge, Aims and Control, 2014, 1), Wrigley explores the relationship between ‘Knowledge’, curriculum and social justice and critiques Social Realist interpretations of the place of knowledge in the development of a socially just curriculum. He argues that for knowledge to be powerful for all learners, it must pay attention to issues of power and inequality. Wrigley contests the commonly postulated idea that critical pedagogy is relativist and suggests that alternative perspectives can offer new insights into seemingly intransigent problems. He also proposes a more socially inclusive model of powerful knowledge that includes both vernacular knowledge from marginalised groups and canonical knowledge from academic disciplines. The importance of curricula that are designed for all learners is developed in the second article. Garcia-Huidobro explores this idea in the context of people from non-dominant backgrounds who want their children’s education to be informed by a curriculum that balances identity and knowledge; home cultures and beliefs and more traditional ‘powerful’ knowledge. This article proposes a model where curriculum design can bridge these two potential worlds through the idea of interstitial curriculum that forms what he describes as connective tissue within and across disciplines. He offers examples from the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program to illustrate how curricular interstices might help address the aspirations by non-dominant communities for a curricular balance between home and society.