Summary
Contents
Subject index
The Sage Handbook of Research on Classroom Assessment provides scholars, professors, graduate students, and other researchers and policy makers in the organizations, agencies, testing companies, and school districts with a comprehensive source of research on all aspects of K-12 classroom assessment. The handbook emphasizes theory, conceptual frameworks, and all varieties of research (quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods) to provide an in-depth understanding of the knowledge base in each area of classroom assessment and how to conduct inquiry in the area. It presents classroom assessment research to convey, in depth, the state of knowledge and understanding that is represented by the research, with particular emphasis on how classroom assessment practices affect student achievement and teacher behavior. Editor James H. McMillan and five Associate Editors bring the best thinking and analysis from leading classroom assessment researchers on the nature of the research, making significant contributions to this prominent and hotly debated topic in education.
Formative and Summative Aspects of Assessment: Theoretical and Research Foundations in the Context of Pedagogy
Formative and Summative Aspects of Assessment: Theoretical and Research Foundations in the Context of Pedagogy
The past 20 years have seen an accelerating growth in studies of formative assessment (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2003; Black & Wiliam, 1998, 2009). However, this has not been matched by a corresponding development in summative assessment. The net effect has been that the changes have not improved the state of discord between these two functions of assessment; however, they may have highlighted more clearly the awareness of this discord and of its harmful effects on teaching and learning. This chapter analyzes the nature of this discord, the conditions necessary for resolving it, and the importance of doing so by enhancing the quality of teachers' summative assessments.
The first section considers the purposes of assessment within the broader framework of a theory of pedagogy, setting out a simple model of the design and implementation of a program for teaching and learning. The next two sections then discuss in turn formative assessment in the light of that model and the use of the model to examine the relationship, in principle and in practice, between the formative and the summative purposes of assessment. This analysis is then taken up in a section that contrasts the importance of enhancing the quality of teachers' summative assessment with the problems encountered in systemic initiatives that aimed to achieve improved summative assessment. Following, there is a more detailed discussion of the problems of enhancing the quality of teachers' summative assessments. A concluding section presents some reflections on the outcome of the argument.
Assessment in a Model of Pedagogy
Studies of teaching and learning in schools use the terms pedagogy and instruction, but often these terms are not precisely defined. Pedagogy is often used as an inclusive term to cover all aspects of teaching and learning. Such authors focus on the exercise of power through curriculum and teaching. Examples would be the study by Paolo Freire (1992) and similar works that add such adjectives as critical, conflict, liberatory, and gender, all of which highlight the political function of pedagogy. This view was expressed very clearly by Alexander (2008b), who stated the following:
Pedagogy is the act of teaching together with its attendant discourse of educational theories, values, evidence and justifications. It is what one needs to know, and the skills one needs to command, in order to make and justify the many different kinds of decision of which teaching is constituted. Curriculum is just one of its domains, albeit a central one. (p. 47)
In these approaches, the term instruction represents one component of the broader realm of pedagogy. Examples are Shulman (1999) and Hallam and Ireson (1999). By contrast, Bruner (1966) used a broad definition of instruction in which it is seen as a guide to pedagogy, the latter being a collection of maxims. These contrasting definitions do not seem to reflect any fundamental difference between those who use these terms in these different ways. What is notable in most of this literature is that assessment receives scant attention. Alexander (2008b), for example, listed the core acts of teaching as “task, activity, interaction, and assessment” (p. 49) but gave the last of these very little attention.
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