Assessment-related development work for the comprehensive school involves difficult choices
Assessment for comprehensive school has been developed intensely in the past decade. In the curriculum, the chapter dealing with assessment has been rewritten, and there are now more specific criteria in support of school-leaving assessment. Soon we will get the first results on how well this this reform has succeeded.
Not only assessment itself, but also insight into assessment is improving. I wrote myself in as follows:
“I hope that the national effort will not be limited to the definition of a few additional competence levels. In long term, we need deliberation on the quality and quantity of objectives. The objectives must be possible to assess reliably, and their number must be reasonable.”
Now I both agree and disagree with this earlier statement of mine.
I agree with the point that the number of assessed objectives is presently too high for teachers – let alone students and parents– to take all of them seriously.
The problem is not only about determining a grade on the assessment scale, but the fact that students should know and understand the objectives and receive feedback on these in the course of learning. I argue a student cannot internalise the 100–200 annual objectives they are studying for, even if the teacher could assess them.
It would be unwise to exclude hard-to-assess skills
I currently cautiously disagree with my claim that all objectives must be possible to assess reliably. Of course, it is necessary to develop and make the assessment criteria as comprehensible as possible. In my opinion, however, important objectives should not be excluded from assessment just because they are hard to assess. Namely, assessment directs learning: you get what you assess.
Many valuable skills for studies, work and life in general are not easy to measure. Such aspects include cooperation, creativity and learning from mistakes. If the purpose is to communicate that these skills are also valuable, they need to be taken into account in assessment in one way or another.
One way is to include them in the objectives to be assessed.
Another way could involve changing the assessment culture of schools, but it is a long journey that advances rather slowly with the current resources of in-service training.
Traditional school assessment does not currently encourage cooperation , creativity or learning from mistakes.
Good results are achieved by concentrating on one’s own individual performance, internalising the preassigned contents, and succeeding at first try in all tests and other competence demonstrations.
For these reasons, I would not be ready to lightly dismiss all current hard-to-assess objectives.
The impacts of assessment on individuals and society are diverse, and therefore these issues must be discussed on a broad basis.
In recent years, the national discussion has focused on grades and particularly on their comparability, but I am personally interested in many other viewpoints as well: How does assessment affect teachers’ and students’ well-being? What kind of picture about learning does assessment convey? And is assessment in its current form socially just?
