Assessing enquiry‐based learning: developing objective criteria from personal knowledge

Abstract

What gives personal knowledge its objectivity, Polanyi maintains, is the free and responsible submission to the claims laid upon the inquirer by the truth he is seeking to discover. (Fitzpatrick 1982, 185) This article takes as its starting point the idea that policies of ‘personalising learning’ and promoting ‘creativity’ raise issues for assessment which the present framework for assessment and testing in schools in England and Wales does little to address. It explores the notion, also touched on elsewhere in this issue, of a dichotomy that needs resolving between subjective (or ‘personal’) and objective (or ‘public’) concerns in the assessment of learning. Drawing on previous research using Rosenblatt's transactional theory of response to literature, the article proposes a resolution based on the unifying concepts of a continuum between two poles and movement of the selective attention between them. Tracing this movement offers a ‘vantage point’ from which the ‘hidden’ or ‘inner’ values of a creative process can be glimpsed, which is likened to the dynamic self‐assessment of learning power. Relating closely to Polanyi's philosophy of personal or ‘tacit’ knowledge, the article argues that enquiry‐based learning is essentially as creative an activity as composing or responding aesthetically to poetry. After constructing five principles from theoretical observations on the evaluation of creativity, the article goes on to develop a set of criteria and objectives, related to the values already discussed, which are offered as a framework to support self‐assessment and joint assessment of enquiry‐based learning.