The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture

Abstract

of assessments used to give grades or to satisfy the accountability demands of an external authority, but rather the kind of that can be used as a part of instruction to support and enhance learning. On this topic, I am especially interested in engaging the very large number of educational researchers who participate, in one way or another, in teacher education. The transformation of practices cannot be accomplished in separate tests and courses, but rather should be a central concern in teaching methods courses. The article is organized in three parts. I present, first, an historical framework highlighting the key tenets of social efficiency curricula, behaviorist learning theories, and scientific measurement. Next, I offer a contrasting socialconstructivist conceptual framework that blends key ideas from cognitive, constructivist, and sociocultural theories. In the third part, I elaborate on the ways that practices should change to be consistent with and support socialconstructivist pedagogy. The impetus for my development of an historical framework was the observation by Beth Graue (1993) that assessment and instruction are often conceived as curiously separate in both time and purpose (p. 291, emphasis added). As Graue notes, the approach to classroom assessment, exemplified by standardized tests and teacher-made emulations of those tests, presents a barrier to the implementation of more constructivist approaches to instruction. To understand the origins of Graue's picture of separation and to help explain its continuing power over presentday practice, I drew the chronology in Figure 1. A longerterm span of history helps us see that those perspectives, now felt to be incompatible with instruction, came from an earlier, highly consistent theoretical framework (on the left) in which conceptions of scientific measurement were closely aligned with traditional curricula and beliefs about learning. To the right is an emergent, constructivist paradigm in which teachers' close of students' understandings, feedback from peers, and student self-assessments would be a central part of the social processes that mediate the development of intellectual abilities, construction of knowledge, and formation of students' identities. The best way to understand dissonant current practices, shown in the middle of the figure, is to realize that instruction (at least in its ideal form) is drawn from the emergent paradigm, while testing is held over from the past. Historical Perspectives: Curriculum, Psychology, and Measurement