AEA-Europe Blog

While students around the world received last summer their report cards and diplomas, in Switzerland, the Federation of Swiss Enterprises (Economiesuisse[1]) recently took a stand on the issue of grades, in a policy paper entitled “Debate on grades at school: we’ve lost our way…”.

Recent Holistic Assessment SIG seminars have prompted reflection on what we mean by the term ‘holistic’, a word often employed in education as a token of approval without clear definition of what it means in practice.

What is the state of educational assessment a quarter of the way into the 21st century? What lessons have been learned from recent decades and what is the agenda for the next quarter century?

When the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes up in relation to educational assessment it tends to be treated with extreme excitement or extreme suspicion, or sometimes a combination of both. The opportunities presented throw up an equal volume of questions and concerns around how and when it should or could be used. An obvious application of AI to educational assessment is to use it for marking (scoring) learners’ responses to test items, against a mark scheme (rubric). Assessments such as GCSE or A level examinations in England comprise many such items, for instance essays and open text responses. And while we’re not currently considering using AI as a prime marker, we are looking at ways to train large language models to support our existing quality assurance arrangements for examination marking.

As the 21st century began to unfurl, it was becoming increasingly evident that technological ‘connectedness’ was revolutionising not only business and interpersonal relationships but also education. It seemed only a question of time before technology would provide an alternative means for supporting learning (Säljö, 2010), drive changes in assessment design (Bennett, 2002; Shute & Becker, 2010), and prompt efforts to reconfigure existing cycles of teaching, learning and assessment (Shute, Ventura & Kim, 2013; Thornton, 2012).

Technology has always been part of education. In the Greco-Roman classroom, for example, the standard form of what we now call an external memory device was the scroll. That was supplanted in the Middle Ages by the codex, which remains with us today, in the form of the book. A book is arguably a more effective piece of technology than a scroll. It’s easier and quicker to search and more easily integrated with metadata, such as page numbers, a table of contents and an index. This pre-digital educational technology isn’t going to go away. It works. Books don’t need batteries, and pencils are cheap.

The internationalisation of Education worldwide has broadened student diversity in educational institutions in recent years.

What did joining the steering group of the AEA SIG eAssessment do for me and IB? Well, it brought me new ideas and a new collaboration

In early 2020 the Welsh Government published Curriculum for Wales Guidance[i], which implies fundamental changes in assessment culture, policy and practice. How does a country radically change its assessment culture? Recent history in Wales provides some messages and raises questions for us all. Recognise that more of the same will no longer work. Concerns about attainment (including PISA scores) from 2012 onwards converged with growing dissatisfaction in the education community with prescriptive curriculum and assessment arrangements: further prescription was not a viable option for improvement. Establish clear parameters for addressing the problem. The Welsh Government in 2014 commissioned an in-depth report[ii] to ‘conduct a fundamental Review of Curriculum and Assessment Arrangements in Wales’ for all 3-16 year-olds. Informed by international research and practice, this provided an integrated framework of proposals to be carried forward through ‘the sustained and active participation of educational practitioners and the wider community’ (p.1). The Welsh Government accepted the recommendations and declared education to be ‘our national mission’[iii]. Understand that fundamental change requires transformative systemic change. The government recognised that its aspirations required radical re-evaluating curriculum principles and structures, assessment purposes, policy development processes and professional learning models.

Digital assessment is sometimes viewed as the bridge between school, work, and active citizenship.

This Assessment Cultures SIG affords an arena for sharing our knowledge about assessment cultures thereby informing and enriching local assessment communities.

There is no doubt that Covid-19 has had a significant impact on educational assessment this year.

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