A thumbnail historical
perspective on assessment
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Assessment- a controversial issue in
education?
"The tendency of the examination system to
arrest growth, to deaden life, to paralyse the higher faculties.. to involve
education in an atmosphere of unreality and self-deception.' (From Edmond
Holmes, What is and what might be, circa 1910)
For those learning to be teachers, it is
helpful to be aware that there has been a revolution in assessment in education
over the past 20 years or so- Pandas, CATS, YELIS, ALIS, SATS, level
descriptors, profile components, even Ofsted itself, are fairly recent
developments. There are also very different opinions about recent trends in
educational assessment, with some arguing that the increase in the volume of
assessment data available to schools, teachers and parents is a good thing, and
others arguing that too much time is being spent 'weighing the pig instead of
fattening it', and that the administrative burdens of assessment, recording and
reporting are having a negative effect on teacher morale. The following are a
few 'snapshots' of aspects of assessment, from the past to the
present. |
'To remember and recite is to learn'- In
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, a catechetical approach to learning
was common, with pupils required to memorise and recite pasages such as the
following:
'Englishwomen are very beautiful; they enjoy
more rights and greater privileges than those in other countries, especially
the married women.' (Lockman, J. 1730, A New History of England, p.
20)
The 1912 equivalent of the 4/98
Standards:
Less complicated than 4/98, less time
consuming to administer, any disadvantages?
'In the early part of the (nineteenth)
century, two schools of educational psychology, one stressing the generic
nature of knowledge, the other focusing on what was unique about different
domains, competed for adherents. Chicago's Charles Judd, who stressed the
distinctive 'psychologies' of the different subjects in the curriculum could
not muster the same appeal as the all-embracing, stimulus-response behaviorism
of Columbia's E.L. Thorndike. The battle raged for many years, but as the
historian of education Ellen Condliffe Lagemann succinctly put it, Thorndike
won.' (Sam Wineburg, 1997, Beyond "Breadth and Depth": subject matter knowledge
and assessment, Theory into practice, Vol. 36, No. 4, p. 256).
What this meant was that there was a move
towards 'breaking down' knowledge/learning into 'bits', and getting learners to
learn all the bits, with the idea that when they had learned all the 'bits',
they would 'know it all'. You can see the influence of this in the original
version of the assessment model for the National Curriculum (see 'History and
the 45 boxes below), and in the 4/98 Standards- Let's break teaching down into
all the bits you need to be a good teacher and then check that trainees can do
all the bits. For the limitations of this approach, see Annex B of the 4/98
Standards, the Standards for ICT in subject teaching.
It is easy to poke fun at some of the less
carefully thought through assessment initiatives of recent years, but it is
salutory to be aware of the very primitive arrangements that pertained before
the recent revolution in assessment.
Two examples of assessment in the secondary
school in the 1960s
An example of 'Cricket Score' assessment
(1970s) and early moves towards 'breaking subjects down into
components'
Some developments in the 1980s
1990s
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