Assessment Research and Practices to Advance Human Learning

Abstract

The 1996 UNESCO report on the four pillars of education notes that one of the dangers of formal or in-school education systems is the tendency to emphasize the attainment of knowledge at the expense of other types of learning. However, assessment systems are not independent from the larger educational systems within which they operate. Teachers, school leaders, and other education personnel are often responding to both nature of assessments and the use of assessment results. Assessment systems tend to employ combinations of both formative and summative assessment, or assessment for learning and assessment of learning. There is significant scholarship taking place in recent years focused on the interplay of formative assessment, student self-regulation, and co-regulation of learning, all of which can contribute to students’ opportunities to learn to know, to do, to live together and to be. However, it is also important to acknowledge the ways in which high-stakes assessments can influence what happens in classrooms, and cause certain classroom practices to be amplified. Whether this amplification has a positive or negative influence on learning depends often on the nature of those summative assessments and the degree to which “teaching to the test” is likely to engage teachers and students in practices that are supportive of deeper learning. This chapter explores research on assessment systems and what is needed for assessment systems to support the types of learning emphasized in the UNESCO report.