Patricia Broadfoot

Redefining assessment? The first ten years of assessment in education

The completion of the first ten years of this journal is an occasion for review and reflection. The main issues that have been addressed over the ten years are summarized in four main sections: Purposes, International Trends, Quality Concerns and Assessment for Learning. Each of these illustrates the underlying significance of the themes of principles, policy and practice, which the journal highlights in its subtitle. The many contributions to these themes that the journal has published illustrate the diversity and complex interactions of the issues. They also illustrate that, across the world, political and public pressures have had the effect of enhancing the dominance of assessment so that the decade has seen a hardening, rather than any resolution, of its many negative effects on society. A closing section looks ahead, arguing that there is a move to rethink more radically the practices and priorities of assessment if it is to respond to human needs rather than to frustrate them.

Developing an Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory: the ELLI Project

This paper reports the initial results of a study that was designed to develop and test an instrument that could identify the elements of an individuals capacity for lifelong learning. We anticipated that the components of this capacity would include a complex mix of dispositions, lived experiences, social relations, values, attitudes and beliefs and that these various factors would coalesce to shape the nature of an individuals engagement with any particular learning opportunity. The instrument that was developed—the Evaluating Lifelong Learning Inventory—was trialled with pupils across a range of ages and subject to factor analytic study. The data have proved robust over successive factor analytic studies, allowing the identification of seven dimensions of learning power and reliable scales to assess these. These dimensions appear to be capable of differentiating between efficacious, engaged and energized learners and passive, dependent and fragile learners. Whilst further, larger scale field trials will be necessary to confirm these early results, the findings would appear to have significant implications for conventional models of curriculum design and classroom practice.

What Professional Responsibility Means to Teachers: national contexts and classroom constants

Summary This article discusses some of the findings pertaining to how teachers see their work which were produced by a comparative study of 360 French and 360 English primary school teachers. The sample was drawn from schools in four different types of matched catchment areas—rural, inner‐city, average suburban and affluent suburban— in Avon, UK and Bouches du Rhone, France. Four major dimensions of difference between the two national contexts are identified in terms of the range of professional activities undertaken; the ambiguity of the teachers task; the style of pedagogy and the relative importance to teachers of the process as against the products of learning. Against a background of contemporary policy changes which seem likely to render the teaching context increasingly similar in the two countries, the article argues that attempts to change teachers’ practice without due regard to those conceptions of professional responsibility which are deeply rooted in particular national traditions as well as...

Comparative and International Research in Education: Scope, Problems and Potential

Abstract This article argues that as the significance of national boundaries increasingly gives way to larger‐scale federations, so the potential salience of comparative and international research in education is dramatically increased. The relevance of such developments for researchers not familiar with the perspectives and literature of comparative and international education is explored in the light of the evolution of this specialist field. The discussion identifies how more researchers could usefully contribute to a strengthening of comparative and international studies, while considering what implications such wider involvement holds for research training. The latter issue is examined with reference to the rapidly increasing involvement of educational researchers in international consultancy work where sensitivity to cross‐cultural factors is especially important.

Power, Learning, and Legitimation: Assessment Implementation Across Levels in the United States and the United Kingdom

Fieldwork conducted in two American states and in England and Wales helps to clarify the implementation of assessment policy at the central, local administrative (school and district), and classroom levels. This article examines implementation from three perspectives. The power perspective suggests that formal sanctions can result in educators attending to assessments but that such sanctions are not likely to change practice alone. A second perspective highlights what educators need to learn in order to change practice and the shortage of opportunities to do so. The legitimacy perspective attends to the ways in which policymakers generate confidence in their institutions at different levels and the conflicting criteria for supporting institutions. We conclude that assessment policy is useful for promoting easily observable changes but not deep modifications of teaching practice.

Self‐assessment in the Primary School

Abstract This paper explores the issue of self‐assessment in the primary school and seeks to demonstrate that the principle of assessment as first and foremost the responsibility of the learner is both valid and can be realistically applied in education from the early years. Having reviewed the arguments for self‐assessment in terms of the important part reviewing can play in promoting learning, the paper considers how pupils may be trained in the skills of self‐assessment and illustrates various ways in which young children can assess their own progress. Examples included cover self‐and peer assessment of a given piece of work, curriculum evaluation, recording achievement and pupils’ termly self‐evaluations in relation to a framework of knowledge and skill targets. In conclusion, some of the possible shortcomings and strengths of such approaches are discussed as part of the need for a whole‐school approach to such developments.

Records of Achievement and The Learning Society: a tale of two discourses

ABSTRACT The first part of the paper briefly explores the implications of creating a learning society’ in terms of the changes this implies for how education is currently organized and delivered. The argument is made that the steadily increasing influence of the discourse of the ‘assessment society‘ — which assumes that all aspects of quality can and should be measured in an overt way — is actively inhibiting the development of a learning society’. The argument is illustrated by a case‐study of the records of achievement initiative — one of the earliest attempts to change the focus of assessment practice in the UK. It concludes by suggesting that while an assessment discourse of ‘performativity’, rather than ‘empowerment’ remains dominant, initiatives like recording achievement are unlikely to have more than a marginal impact.

Dark Alleys and Blind Bends: Testing the Language of Learning.

This article presents a revised version of the author’s Samuel Messick Memorial lecture in 2003. Messick’s emphasis on consequential validity is used to identify some of the negative effects of current practices as they affect the quality of students’ learning and motivation. It suggests that there have been many ‘dark alleys’ in which poorly understood assessment technologies have been used thoughtlessly or have been located on ‘blind bends’ in which a lack of sufficient preparation and knowledge has resulted in assessment practices that are dangerous and, potentially, very damaging to learners. In the light of these problems the article argues for a more constructive approach to assessment. Taking the particular context of language learning, the article describes a new assessment tool, The Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI), which has a very different purpose: the identification of an individual’s power to learn. It argues the need to replace the conventional lexicon of testing with a focus on key learning dimensions such as confidence, collaboration, critical curiosity and creativity - the feelings and dispositions that are argued to be central to learning.

Stones from Other Hills may Serve to Polish the Jade of this One: towards a neo‐comparative ‘learnology’ of education

Abstract This is a revised version of the 1998 Presidential address to the newly‐inaugurated British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE). The paper reviews the tension within the history of comparative education between qualitative, culturally‐focused studies and more positivist approaches. It explores the dangers, as well as the possibilities, inherent in the rapidly‐growing interest in comparative studies. It argues that the advent of postmodernism presents a new challenge for comparativists that requires culture to be accorded a central place in efforts to understand educational organisations and practices. Finally, the paper outlines the desirable characteristics of a ‘neo‐comparative’ education, of a comparative ‘learnology’ which integrates a range of different social science perspectives, and is both rigorous and radical.

A Lesson in Progress? Primary Classrooms Observed in England and France

Abstract As part of the Bristol‐Aix project, a comparative study of primary school teachers in England and France prior to the introduction of the National Curriculum, teachers in the two countries were ‘shadowed’ for a week at a time in order to focus in a detailed way on their classroom practice. Striking differences were observed in pedagogy, in classroom organisation, and in teacher‐pupil relations, which were far greater between the two countries than any of the differences observed within one country. The findings provide a basis for projecting some of the more likely results of current policy initiatives in England and Wales and contribute to an understanding of teachers’ responses to educational change.