Assessment in Harmony with our Understanding of Learning: Problems and Possibilities

Abstract

The discussion of classroom assessment practice and implications for teachers’ professional learning, in Part I, draws attention to the close relationship between assessment and pedagogy. Indeed, the central argument is that effective assessment for learning is central and integral to teaching and learning. This raises some theoretical questions about the ways in which assessment, on the one hand, and learning, on the other, are conceptualised and how they articulate. This chapter considers the relationship between assessment practice and the ways in which the processes and outcomes of learning are understood. Starting from an assumption that there should be a degree of alignment between assessment and our understandings of learning, the equivalent chapter (James, 2006) in the first edition of this book described and analysed the perspectives on learning that might be extrapolated from a number of different approaches to the practice of classroom assessment. Learning theorists themselves rarely make statements about how learning processes and outcomes within their models should be assessed, which may account for the lack of development of assessments aligned with some of the most interesting new learning theory. The intention of the earlier chapter was therefore to examine more closely the implications for assessment practice of three clusters of learning theories – behaviourist, cognitive constructivist and socio-cultural – and discuss whether eclectic or synthetic models of assessments, matched to learning, are feasible. The revision of that chapter offered here has a slightly different purpose. Instead of providing a review across the range of historic theories, it focuses on the problems and possibilities of developing assessment practice congruent with socio-cultural learning theory. There are three particular reasons for this decision, all connected with the present author’s more recent work. The first is that discussion of models of assessment consonant with socio-cultural perspectives on learning emerged as a common theme (James, 2010) in a significant number of the 53 articles, from across the world, in the ‘Educational Assessment’ section of the