AEA-Europe’s Assessment Cultures SIG was formed a year after the publication of the book Assessment Cultures: Historical Perspectives edited by Professor Martin Lawn and Dr. Cristina Alarcon (pub. Peter Lang, Studia Educationis Historica, 2018).  Cristina was the first person to present a webinar for us, Assessment Cultures: Challenges and Chances of an analytical tool, on 14th May 2021.

Cristina’s talk helped us to address the questions Why should we make ourselves more aware of our assessment cultures? And how may we do that? This is a significant time for us to look back: the fourth of our colleagues has now taken over as Chair of the SIG and we might ask ourselves how we judge our progress.
 
Cristina proposed that the concept of ‘assessment culture’ could be used to evaluate proposals that countries might take part in international assessments. She had personal experience of two assessment cultures as a student, in Germany and Chile.

The eighth slide in Cristina’s talk raises the question,  Why ‘within the current homogenizing global testing regime’ must we avoid neglecting ‘the cultural and historical conditions of assessment’? Cristina advocates a diversity of assessment practices. She favours the preservation of ‘a qualitative-contextualising constructivism’, as opposed to a ‘testing culture’ whose reference is ‘behaviourism and the psychometric-quantitative paradigm’.

Bildung is an important concept which has been influential throughout Europe. Its emphasis is on the humanising intentions of education and thus it compares with a more scientifically, quantitative approach.

Cristina quotes the following definition:
“Bildung means the stimulation of all the powers of a human being so that these develop harmoniously … [and] lead to a self-determining individuality … which enriches humanity in its ideality and uniqueness”.
(Brockhaus Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, 20th edition 1997, s.v.”Bildung”)

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