Roles of assessment in secondary education: Participant perspectives

Abstract

Performance pressure at both the institutional and individual level of secondary education has been identified as a pressure that is acknowledged all over Europe and raises questions about the extent to which agents in lower and upper secondary education interpret assessment in terms of either control or learning, or perhaps both. Drawing on empirical findings from two case studies in Denmark, the article focuses on the social roles of educational evaluation and assessment, and discusses the ways in which the local level interpretations of policy demands influence teaching and learning in secondary education. To enable an analysis of the understanding of different agents in the field, the article combines important sociological thinking with the basic distinction between assessment of programmes and assessment of individuals. Presuming that assessment practices bear the traces of the social structure that they both express and reproduce, the aim of this paper is to interrogate how the agents view and interpret such practices.