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Mediating academic research: the Assessment Reform Group experience
Abstract
Incl. abstract, bibl. The interface between education research and education policy in the UK has been discussed, explored and redefined over nearly two decades since the Education Reform Act of 1988. This contribution analyses how one group of researchers, in the field of assessment, has attempted to exploit the potential for evidence from research to influence education policies in the UK. Using Levin's model of the elements of research impact as a starting point, it reflects upon the Assessment Reform Group's attempts to exploit the potential for academic research to influence policy and practice. It concludes by discussing how the interface between research and policy might be better conceptualized and how seeking to make research both usable and useful has implications for judging the quality of research in education.
... Assessment is considered as an integral component of the learning process in order to provide students with reliable opportunities to enhance the acquisition of both knowledge and learning skills (Ashford- Rowe, Herrington & Brown, 2013). In addition, Curriculum, teaching strategies, learning activities, students' grades and their placement are all influenced by assessment practices (Daugherty, 2007). ...
Educational goals and learning outcomes can be linked successfully through integrating appropriate assessment practices to align with the teaching and learning targets. This study seeks to explore teachers' perceptions about assessment types and to investigate the extent to which teachers use assessment results to seek improvement of education. Thus, Mixed methods approach was conducted through collecting both quantitative and qualitative data by using a questionnaire and interviews. Results found that although teachers have acquired clear knowledge about the meaning and types of assessment, they still focus more in written quizzes as their main formative assessment and designing final exams as their summative assessment. Subsequently, the assessment data are mainly used to assign students' grades. This study suggested that evidence-based assessment research should seriously be used to take decisions about assessment strategies and the follow up on its sequences to reduce the gap between teachers' beliefs and their actual practices.
... This was known as the BERA Assessment Policy Task Group but later transformed into the UK Assessment Reform Group (ARG). (See Daugherty, 2007, for an account of the work of this group.) As one of its activities, the ARG decided to seek funding to update a review, by Terry Crooks in New Zealand, of research on the impact of evaluation/assessment practices on student learning. ...
This chapter examines the challenges of embedding formative assessment in classroom practice. It begins with a brief history of an idea that has become popular across the world in recent years. It asks why formative assessment is such a potentially powerful idea and also why it has had such uncertain impact. It looks again at what formative assessment, also known as assessment for learning, is and how practices associated with it can be improved. Sources of problems in conceptualisation and implementation are examined, and research on organisational conditions for embedding in classrooms and spreading within and across schools is described. The importance of developing both teachers’ practices and their beliefs about learning is highlighted. The chapter concludes with some reflection on what might be done to put the idea back on track and considers especially the potential role of developers of tools to assist teachers and students in implementing formative assessment.
... The work of the ARG is described by Richard Daugherty (2007:145) as having two phases. The first, from 1989 to 1995, was characterized as active engagement with policy issues drawing on research evidence and the experience of education professionals to critique policies that were already being implemented. ...
Developments in the United Kingdom, with respect to Assessment for Learning (AfL), need to be understood in relation to interactions
between research and policy. On the one hand, AfL ideas and practices have been developed, defined, refined and disseminated
by members of the educational research community, and especially by members of the UK Assessment Reform Group. On the other
hand, they have been interpreted, reinterpreted and incorporated into national policy by government agencies to meet goals
of educational reform. This chapter describes the policy contexts and the distinct ways in which AfL has been taken up and
implemented in each of the four countries of the UK, and the extent of policy borrowing among them. Divergence between England
and the other three countries is explored and attributed to differences in: understandings of ideas about “learning” and “performance”;
beliefs about which practices and aspects of overall assessment policy will raise standards; and the relationships between
researchers and policy-makers. Effective educational change for the benefit of learners and learning will require researchers
and policy-makers to maintain a continuing dialogue in order to deepen understanding of the relationship between assessment
and learning, and to tackle issues associated with “going to scale”. Researchers, especially, will need to engage in ongoing
creative mediation so that AfL ideas and practices are renewed in ways congruent with defensible purposes.
Comment éviter de piloter l'éducation au doigt mouillé, en fonction de la mode ou de l'opinion ? Comment repérer les bonnes pratiques et les bonnes méthodes pour que la France améliore ses résultats dans PISA ? Comment utiliser les acquis de la science pour mieux enseigner ? Ces interrogations sont désormais récurrentes.
Elle reviennent d'abord à se demander quels savoirs sont nécessaires pour l'éducation et où ils sont actuellement disponibles. Elles impliquent ensuite de comprendre comment ces savoirs issus des laboratoires universitaires peuvent être appropriés sur le terrain, par tous les acteurs de l'éducation. Voire même dans quelle mesure ces derniers peuvent contribuer à produire ces savoirs !
Ces questions sont sources de nombreuses controverses au niveau international comme en France. Certains défendent l'idée que l'éducation c'est avant tout une série de preuves techniques que la science peut déterminer. D'autres pensent qu'il y a dans l'enseignement trop de culture, de valeurs et de complexité pour régler la question simplement entre deux protocoles expérimentaux.
Il faut aussi noter la défiance de certains acteurs, même au plus haut niveau, envers les "sciences de l'éducation", toujours sommées d'avoir à faire la preuve de leur utilité comme de leur caractère scientifique.
Après avoir rappelé les enjeux de la situation actuelle, ce dossier vise donc à fixer des repères pour une approche scientifique de l’éducation dans le contexte de la recherche universitaire.
Nous revenons ensuite dans un deuxième temps sur la signification de l’evidence-based education, concept controversé qui a largement débordé son aire anglo-saxonne d’origine pour devenir un terme usuel.
Nous envisageons enfin dans un troisième temps comment peuvent être articulés les rapports entre recherche, pratiques et politiques éducatives, et l’engagement concret des acteurs qui relèvent de ces différents contextes.
Background: National curriculum assessment (NCA) in England has been in place for nearly 20 years. It has its origins in a political desire to regulate education, holding schools accountable. However, its form and nature also reflect educational and curriculum concerns and technical assessment issues.Purpose: The aim of the article is to provide a narrative account of the development and changes in NCA in England from its initiation to 2008 and to explain the reasons for these.Sources of evidence: The sources quoted are in the public domain, but in addition to academic articles, include political biographies and published official papers.Main argument and conclusions: NCA in England has evolved over 20 years, from an attempt at a criterion-referenced system based on tasks marked by the children's own teachers through to an externally marked examination system. This change reflects the political purposes of the system for accountability, and the pressure associated with this has led to growing criticism of the effects on children and their education. Nonetheless, the results provided are widely used by the public and government, and the reasons for the survival of the system lie in both its utility and the difficulty of identifying a new system which is necessarily an improvement for all the stakeholders involved.
The focus of this article is recent work by the Assessment Reform Group (ARG) on the role of teachers' judgements in the summative use of assessment. A brief overview of the early work of the ARG is followed by discussion of the desirable properties of assessment for summative uses. The work of the ARG's Assessment Systems for the Future project provided evidence and arguments concerning the validity, reliability, impact and cost of tests and of summative assessment by teachers. Whilst there is ample evidence that the teachers' judgements are more valid than, and equally reliable as, tests, there is a danger of unwanted impact on teaching as long as results are used for ‘high stakes’ evaluation of teachers and schools. Implications for policy include an end to the practice of using the results of pupils' summative assessment, however they are derived, as the sole basis for target setting and school accountability.
The aim of the reported study was to explore how science teachers made sense of their roles and responsibilities in teaching
and assessing science coursework. The focus was on the teacher assessment, the feedback that teachers gave to students and,
how they perceived their role when they taught and assessed students’ science coursework reports. The research methodology
included observation of science lessons, collection of marked students’ reports and two interviews with each of the nine participant
teachers. Two cases of teachers are considered as representative of the participant teachers and their perceptions and practices
are compared and contrasted. Teachers either adopted the role of the examiner or combined the role of the teacher with that
of examiner. They distinguished marking of science theory exercises from marking of coursework and, teaching theory from teaching
investigations, on the basis that the grade they assigned to coursework contributed to the total grade for external exams.
A key conclusion is that teaching and assessment of science coursework need to re-focus on learning. The study calls for changes
in public policy for summative assessment to place more reliance on teachers’ assessments and secondly, for changes in school
practices in formative assessment for teachers to support students to learn in the case of science coursework.
Credentials are a salient form of cultural capital and if a student’s learning and productions are not assessed, they are invisible in current social systems of education and employment. In this field, invisible equals non-existent. This paper arises from the context of an alternative education institution where conventional educational assessment techniques currently fail to recognise the creativity and skills of a cohort of marginalised young people. In order to facilitate a new assessment model an electronic portfolio system (EPS) is being developed and trialled to capture evidence of students’ learning and their productions. In so doing a dynamic system of arranging, exhibiting, exploiting and disseminating assessment data in the form of coherent, meaningful and valuable reports will be maintained.
The paper investigates the notion of assessing development of creative thinking and skills through the means of a computerised system that operates in an area described as the efield. A model of the efield is delineated and is explained as a zone existing within the internet where free users exploit the cloud and cultivate social and cultural capital.
Drawing largely on sociocultural theory and Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capitals, the article positions the efield as a potentially productive instrument in assessment for learning practices. An important aspect of the dynamics of this instrument is the recognition of teachers as learners. This is seen as an integral factor in the sociocultural approach to assessment for learning practices that will be deployed with the EPS. What actually takes place is argued to be assessment for learning as a field of exchange.
The model produced in this research is aimed at delivering visibility and recognition through an engaging instrument that will enhance the prospects of marginalised young people and shift the paradigm for assessment in a creative world.
This article is a review of the literature on classroom formative assessment. Several studies show firm evidence that innovations designed to strengthen the frequent feedback that students receive about their learning yield substantial learning gains. The perceptions of students and their role in self‐assessment are considered alongside analysis of the strategies used by teachers and the formative strategies incorporated in such systemic approaches as mastery learning. There follows a more detailed and theoretical analysis of the nature of feedback, which provides a basis for a discussion of the development of theoretical models for formative assessment and of the prospects for the improvement of practice.
This volume offers an exploration of major changes in the way
knowledge is produced in science, technology, social science,
& humanities, arguing that a new mode of knowledge production
promises to replace or radically reform established
institutions, disciplines, practices, & policies. A range of
features - reflexivity, transdisciplinarity, heterogeneity -
associated with the new mode of knowledge production are
identified to illustrate the connections between them & the
changing role of knowledge in social relations.
Methodological difficulties inherent in attempts to describe
a new mode of knowledge production are discussed, &
implications of this mode for science policy & international
economic competitiveness, collaboration, & globalization are
treated. The book is particularly relevant for those
concerned with educational systems, the changing nature of
knowledge, the social study of science, & the connections
between research & development, & social, economic, &
technological development. The book is presented in 7 Chpts
with a Preface & an Introduction. (1) Evolution of Knowledge
Production. (2) The Marketability and Commercialisation of
Knowledge. (3) Massification of Research and Education. (4)
The Case of the Humanities. (5) Competitiveness,
Collaboration and Globalisation. (6) Reconfiguring
Institutions. (7) Towards Managing Socially Distributed
Knowledge. References accompany each Chpt. 2 Tables. W.
Howard (Copyright 1995, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all
rights reserved.)
The authors trace the development of the King's Formative Assessment Programme from its origins in diagnostic testing in the 1970s, through the graded assessment movement in the 1980s, to the present day. In doing so, they discuss the practical issues involved in reviewing research and outline the strategies that were used to try to communicate the findings to as wide an audience as possible (including policy-makers and practitioners as well as academics). They describe how they worked with teachers to develop formative practice in classrooms, and discuss the impact that this work has had on practice and policy. Finally, they speculate about some of the reasons for this impact, and make suggestions for how the impact of educational research on policy and practice might be improved.
In this paper we discuss the potential for using systematic reviews of research to inform policy in education against the background of severe criticisms of the quality and relevance of individual research studies, most recently by the Commission on the Social Sciences. The potential is set against the reality of conducting systematic reviews of research, following the procedures of the EPPI-Centre. The issues raised and discussed relate to: the specification of the review question, the selection of studies of various designs, the criteria for evaluating research and the identification of implications for users of research in education. The chief obstacles to more effective use of educational research are identified as the different discourses of researchers, practitioners and policy makers; obstacles that only genuinely closer working and mutual understanding of difference priorities, timescales and discourses can address.
*This article is the text of the Presidential Address to the British Educational Research Association given at the University of Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, 1989.
This paper outlines a case for the reconfiguration of the public sphere as discursive space, arguing that such a reconfiguration better enables investigations into public debates on education. The paper focuses on one such investigation, which studied one newspaper's reporting of a review of the school curriculum in Queensland, Australia. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the interrelationships between policy discourses and the discourses about the review that were constructed in the print media. The paper shows how the dynamic structure of the public sphere enabled discursive connections to be made across sites in order to privilege a shared public discourse on education policy, schools and teachers. In so doing, it demonstrates the capacity of the public sphere to define educational issues and identities in particular ways.
The starting point for this paper is the ongoing debate about the relation between research and policy in education. Recent developments in England and Scotland are reviewed in the context of political and academic arguments about the nature and function of research activity. The defensiveness of the research community in the face of professional and political attacks is examined critically. A case study of the Higher Still programme is used to illustrate the complexity of the relationships between evidence, ideology, values and professional practice. It is argued that the research community needs to become more politically sophisticated and to advance a clearer vision of its social function in advanced democratic societies if its potential contribution to educational development is to be realised. The dangers of a retreat to a narrow empirical role are highlighted.
The theory of formative assessment outlined in this article is relevant to a broad spectrum of learning outcomes in a wide variety of subjects. Specifically, it applies wherever multiple criteria are used in making judgments about the quality of student responses. The theory has less relevance for outcomes in which student responses may be assessed simply as correct or incorrect. Feedback is defined in a particular way to highlight its function in formative assessment. This definition differs in several significant respects from that traditionally found in educational research. Three conditions for effective feedback are then identified and their implications discussed. A key premise is that for students to be able to improve, they must develop the capacity to monitor the quality of their own work during actual production. This in turn requires that students possess an appreciation of what high quality work is, that they have the evaluative skill necessary for them to compare with some objectivity the quality of what they are producing in relation to the higher standard, and that they develop a store of tactics or moves which can be drawn upon to modify their own work. It is argued that these skills can be developed by providing direct authentic evaluative experience for students. Instructional systems which do not make explicit provision for the acquisition of evaluative expertise are deficient, because they set up artificial but potentially removable performance ceilings for students.
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