of assessments used to give grades or to satisfy the accountability demands of an external authority, but rather the kind of assessment that can be used as a part of instruction to support and enhance learning. On this topic, I am especially interested in engaging the very large number of educational researchers who participate, in one way or another, in teacher education. The transformation of assessment practices cannot be accomplished in separate tests and measurement courses, but rather should be a central concern in teaching methods courses. The article is organized in three parts. I present, first, an historical framework highlighting the key tenets of social efficiency curricula, behaviorist learning theories, and "scientific measurement." Next, I offer a contrasting socialconstructivist conceptual framework that blends key ideas from cognitive, constructivist, and sociocultural theories. In the third part, I elaborate on the ways that assessment practices should change to be consistent with and support socialconstructivist pedagogy. The impetus for my development of an historical framework was the observation by Beth Graue (1993) that "assessment and instruction are often conceived as curiously separate in both time and purpose" (p. 291, emphasis added). As Graue notes, the measurement approach to classroom assessment, "exemplified by standardized tests and teacher-made emulations of those tests," presents a barrier to the implementation of more constructivist approaches to instruction. To understand the origins of Graue's picture of separation and to help explain its continuing power over presentday practice, I drew the chronology in Figure 1. A longerterm span of history helps us see that those measurement perspectives, now felt to be incompatible with instruction, came from an earlier, highly consistent theoretical framework (on the left) in which conceptions of "scientific measurement" were closely aligned with traditional curricula and beliefs about learning. To the right is an emergent, constructivist paradigm in which teachers' close assessment of students' understandings, feedback from peers, and student self-assessments would be a central part of the social processes that mediate the development of intellectual abilities, construction of knowledge, and formation of students' identities. The best way to understand dissonant current practices, shown in the middle of the figure, is to realize that instruction (at least in its ideal form) is drawn from the emergent paradigm, while testing is held over from the past. Historical Perspectives: Curriculum, Psychology, and Measurement

/pdf/the-role-of-assessment-in-a-learning-culture-wotzl5md4p.pdf

The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture

Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment

Classroom teachers are finding the implementation of constructivist instruction far more difficult than the reform community acknowledges. This article presents a theoretical analysis of constructivism in practice by building a framework of dilemmas that explicates the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political planes of the constructivist teaching experience. In this context, “constructivism in practice” is a concept situated in the ambiguities, tensions, and compromises that arise among stakeholders in the educational enterprise as constructivism is used as a basis for teaching. In addition to providing a unique theoretical perspective for researchers, the framework is a heuristic for teachers, providing critical questions that allow them to interrogate their own beliefs, question institutional routines, and understand more deeply the forces that influence their classroom practice

Framing Constructivism in Practice as the Negotiation of Dilemmas: An Analysis of the Conceptual, Pedagogical, Cultural, and Political Challenges Facing Teachers

The authors describe an evolving theoretical framework that has been called one of the best kept secrets of academia: cultural-historical activity theory, the result of proposals Lev Vygotsky first articulated but that his students and followers substantially developed to constitute much expanded forms in its second and third generations. Besides showing that activity theory transforms how research should proceed regarding language, language learning, and literacy in particular, the authors demonstrate how it is a theory for praxis, thereby offering the potential to overcome some of the most profound problems that have plagued both educational theorizing and practice.

/pdf/vygotsky-s-neglected-legacy-cultural-historical-activity-32amo9jh2f.pdf

“Vygotsky’s Neglected Legacy”: Cultural-Historical Activity Theory:

As online and blended learning has become common place educational strategy in higher education, educators need to reconceptualise fundamental issues of teaching, learning and assessment in non traditional spaces. These issues include concepts such as validity and reliability of assessment in online environments in relation to serving the intended purposes, as well as understanding how formative assessment functions within online and blended learning. This article provides a systematic qualitative review of the research literature on online formative assessment in higher education. As an integrative narrative review, the method applied in this review entailed systematic searching, reviewing, and writing this review of the literature to bring together key themes and findings of research in this field. The authors applied qualitative thematic criteria in selecting and reviewing the available literature from which they focused on identifying and analyzing the core themes that are central to the concept of formative assessment with a key focus on application of formative assessment within blended and online contexts. Various techniques were identified for formative assessment by the individual, peers and the teacher, many of which were linked with online tools such as self-test quiz tools, discussion forums and e-portfolios. The benefits identified include improvement of learner engagement and centrality in the process as key actors, including the development of a learning community. The key findings are that effective online formative assessment can foster a learner and assessment centered focus through formative feedback and enhanced learner engagement with valuable learning experiences. Ongoing authentic assessment activities and interactive formative feedback were identified as important characteristics that can address threats to validity and reliability within the context of online formative assessment.

Online formative assessment in higher education: A review of the literature

Socio-Cultural Aspects of Assessment

ion and memory skills, and the separability of social from cognitive skills and knowledge from action . . . performance in cognitive tasks is inseparable from values about appropriate social relationships in such situations\" (pp. 58-59). Reliance on others for help in problem-solving situations varies according to the cultural setting. In traditional American and British school settings, relying on a companion for help in assessment is likely to be considered cheating, whereas in other settings in everyday situations not to use a companion's assistance may be regarded as inappropriate. Some researchers in the sociocultural perspective, which focuses on situated learning, suggest that assessment is not necessary, while others suggest that individuals must be assessed as part of a group. For example. Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that, in the apprenticeship system, testing is not necessary since increasing participation has its own use value; in settings such as schools, however, learning becomes commoditized, and exchange value, demonstrated through testing, replaces use value: Gipps: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Assessment 377 The commoditization of learning engenders a fundamental contradiction between the use and exchange values of the outcome of learning, which manifests itself in conflicts between learning to know and learning to display knowledge for evaluation. Testing in schools and trade schools (unnecessary in situations of apprenticeship learning) is perhaps the most pervasive and salient example of a way of establishing the exchange value of knowledge. Test taking then becomes a new parasitic practice, the goal of which is to increase the exchange value of learning independently of its use value, (p. 112) The requirement, in the sociocultural perspective, to assess the processes of learning and to assess learning in the social setting can be met in a number of ways. Portfolios can be used to reflect the processes of learning and their development over time. Portfolios, of course, take many forms: They may contain items selected at intervals by the teacher or \"best\" pieces of work chosen by the pupil; work in the portfolio may be assessed in a more or less standardized way (Koretz et al., 1993). To support the sociocultural model of learning, they need in some way to reflect or articulate the social setting in which the learning took place. Commentary by the teacher and the pupil can describe the social situation of learning. For example, student and teacher commentaries are part of the final portfolio in the PROPEL project (Wolf et al., 1991). These commentaries are focused on the process of learning and developing achievement, and they encourage reflection on the part of both pupil and teacher. The process, Wolf (1989) argues, is difficult because portfolios ' 'demand intimate and often frighteningly subjective talk with students\" (p. 37). Pupils may be unwilling to engage in the intellectual process, while teachers may be unable to give up control of the discussion. But when it works, she argues, it is well worth the effort. Assessment within a social situation can be afforded by assessing students in collaborative group activities in which they contribute to a task and help others. \"In such assessment, as in instruction using group approaches, the student can observe how others reason and can receive feedback on his or her own efforts. In this context, not only performance, but also the facility with which a student adapts to help and guidance, can be assessed\" (Glaser & Silver, 1994, pp. 412-413). Such socially situated collaborative assessment also has the advantage of encouraging students to develop and question their definitions of competence. Brown and colleagues analyze collaborative assessment environments and compare them with collaborative teaching environments. In their view (Brown et al., 1992), the crucial difference between the two is that in the teaching environment aid is opportunistic, while in the assessment environment aid is in the form of \"standardized hints.\" Lampert (1990) describes a project in the teaching of mathematics in which the roles and responsibilities of teachers and students within classroom discourse were altered. Sometimes the teacher consciously held back from commenting on answers given by students, and so the class developed discussion around the problems and tasks, made hypotheses about solutions, and took risks in the way that the mathematical community would. The teacher, standing back, refused to be the intellectual authority in the way that is normally the case in school mathematics. This approach to learning in a classroom community entails a 378 Review of Research in Education, 24 different view of assessment of pupil attainment, one based very much on understanding: The questions I expected them to answer went beyond simply determining whether they could get the solutions. I also expected them to answer questions about mathematical assumptions and the legitimacy of their strategies. Answers to problems were given by students, but I did not interpret them to be the primary indication of whether they knew mathematics, (p. 38) The emphasis was on the analysis of the students' language, their assertions, and their ability to demonstrate that their strategies were valid. In such a group/community learning situation, assessment may be focused as much on the group as on individuals: \"By the end of the lesson, 14 of the 18 students present in the class had had something mathematically substantial to say about exponents\" (p. 52). Cobb and Bowers (1998), too, talk about assessment (using the term evaluation) within the group. Within their cognitive and situated perspective on learning, performance is socially situated. Therefore, the teacher should evaluate the group's changing beliefs and reasoning, and the individual should be evaluated in relation to the group. The issue for Cobb and Bowers is how one views individuals whose (mathematical) reasoning is less effective than others in the group. They describe such students as those who have less sophisticated ways of participating in particular classroom practices. Since performance is socially situated, the performance resides not just in the student but in the relationship between the teacher and the individual. They treat academic success/failure as the exclusive property neither of individual students nor of the instruction they receive. They see it as a \"relation\" between individual students and the practices that they and the teacher construct. So, pupil assessment in this model focuses on the individual as part of the group, and the key issue becomes how or whether one interprets the evidence of performance of individuals. Assessment within the framework of sociocultural theory is seen as interactive, dynamic, and collaborative. Rather than an external and formalized activity, assessment is integral to the teaching process and embedded in the social and cultural life of the classroom. Such an approach is seen as constructive—because of its focus on assessing the process of learning, the attempt to elicit elaborated performance, and the emphasis on collaborative activity (whether the collaboration is with the teacher or a group of peers). Much of the work in this field is still at the level of research, however, and a number of issues remain to be clarified. For example, such assessment is often time consuming and demands particular skills of the teacher/assessor. The procedures, being unstandardized, do not meet traditional reliability criteria, and this has an impact on the purposes for which the assessment can or should be used. There are many issues to be resolved around the evaluation of individuals within group performance. A key issue, too, is the relationship between teacher/assessor and pupil. The Assessment Relationship In traditional assessment, the relationship between teacher and student is a hierarchical one. The teacher sets and defines the task and determines its evaluation. The student's role is to be the object of this activity and, through the Gipps: Socio-Cultυral Aspects of Assessment 379 completion of a range of tests, to be graded. However, if one uses an interpretive approach, there are other ways of seeing this relationship. In newer forms of assessment, such as negotiated assessment and self-assessment, the student has a role in discussing and negotiating the terms and outcomes of the assessment, although in reality such a practice may be rare. The thesis behind such a nontraditional approach (critical-theoretic in Habermas's framework) is that students need to become involved in the assessment process so that they are encouraged to monitor and reflect on their own performance in order to become self-monitoring and self-regulating learners (Broadfoot, 1996; Wittrock & Baker, 1991; Wolf et al., 1991). A key element of the interpretive paradigm is the need to understand a learner's response. In relation to informal assessment, this includes the learner's expectations, assumptions, and interpretations of the classroom culture, task demands, and criteria for success (Aikenhead, 1997). Sadler (1998), developing this line of argument further, points out that teachers commonly bring with them to the assessment setting a more elaborate and extensive knowledge base, a set of attitudes or dispositions toward teaching as an activity, skill in devising assessments, a deep knowledge of criteria and standards appropriate to the assess­ ment task, evaluative skills in making judgements about student performance, and expertise in framing feedback statements. Sadler argues that an appreciation of these resources and skills is important because eventually the teacher must share them with the student in order to pass them on. Ultimately the intention of most educational systems is to help students not only grow in knowledge and expertise, but also to become progressively independent of the teacher fo

Caroline Gipps

Papers

Socio-Cultural Aspects of Assessment

Chapter 10: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Assessment: