Classroom-based assessment

Introduction

The assessment of students in the classroom has been going on since time immemorial. What is comparatively recent, however, is the systematic study of classroom-based assessment (CBA). The term ‘CBA’ has been putatively linked to Michael Scriven's (1967) work on formative and summative evaluation. However, current interest in such assessment and how it is enacted has, to a large extent, been prompted by shifts in educational policy in various contexts and evolving education systems. This, in turn, has led to the increase in research activity that is detailed in the timeline that follows. At the same time, considerable effort has been exerted by various governments and professional associations into the development of CBA frameworks, but as publications related to these are not strictly research documents, a separate list of examples is provided as supplementary material.

Initially, research interest in the nature and enactment of formative CBA came from the field of general education. For example, in the late 1980s, as part of a radical overhaul of the school education system in England that placed emphasis on central government control of the curriculum and of assessment, the Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT) drew up a report that reflected an attempt to, inter alia, reconcile the conflicting demands of high-stakes public reporting of student performance in accordance with statutory curriculum specifications, and educationally-oriented assessment that reports student progression in the light of teaching (and therefore learning) experience (TGAT, 1987). Paragraph 5 of the report stated that the results of assessment ‘should provide a basis for decisions about pupils’ further learning needs: they should be formative’.

The chair of the TGAT task group, Paul Black, later published a seminal paper on formative assessment with Dylan Wiliam (Black & Wiliam, 1998). This seminal ‘state of play’ review of research on classroom-based formative assessment covered 681 publications which reported on a range of studies with diverse research designs and methodologies investigating formative assessment schemes and practices at different educational levels and settings internationally. Some of the studies had experimental and control groups, others were classroom-based and teacher-led. The analysis and commentary in the Black and Wiliam paper foregrounded issues such as quality of teacher–student interaction, feedback, the role of the student in assessment, and self and peer assessment. Many of these issues resonate with the current work in formative assessment. The authors’ list of issues to be taken into account by researchers in investigating formative assessment is as relevant today as it was then. Many of these have been taken up by those researching CBA within the field of languages education with some reflected in the present timeline.

Educational reform in England in the 1980s provided the impetus for investigations into how teachers assess in situations where English is used as an additional language particularly at the primary and secondary school levels of education. But it was not only England that towards the turn of the century was experiencing educational reform: notable examples of reform include the introduction of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement in New Zealand in 2002 (see East & Scott, 2011, for a historical account), the introduction of school-based assessment (SBA) as an element of secondary school assessment in Hong Kong from 2001, as well as the introduction of Scottish National Standardised Assessments since 2017. What all these initiatives have in common is a commitment to the assessment for learning (AfL) as well as a growing interest in understanding how such assessment is implemented at the classroom level. This, in turn, has exposed existing tension between national policy recommendations and challenges of classroom implementation. It has also drawn attention to the need for improved assessment literacy for teachers, many of whom have continued to rely heavily on summative assessment practices despite the fact that limitations of summative assessment had been unequivocally demonstrated. Wiliam (2001), for example, was able to show that from a mathematical perspective the results of high-stakes tests may produce highly unreliable results for individual students even when they are deemed reliable for the group as a whole.

The formative–summative assessment dichotomy was for some time portrayed over-simplistically. Case study research of individual classrooms has shed light on the complexities of formative CBA in general and more specifically in language education which has to work with a variety of pedagogic concepts and learning theories. This kind of research has highlighted the limited applicability of the psychometric paradigm dominant within summative, standardised assessment to account for unplanned, often context and content-embedded implicit assessment that is part and parcel of CBA. Such research has provided a basis for the development of CBA frameworks that take account of teacher and student interactions. Unlike in psychometrically oriented assessments, CBA is predominantly located within the classroom, thus making it important to take account of participants’ perspectives and understandings in relation to curriculum and assessment requirements.

CBA has developed along two main trajectories: theory building to better understand its conceptual basis (construct) and analysing on a moment-by-moment basis how it is enacted in classrooms at different educational levels and in different world locations. These, therefore, form the main themes of our timeline. In this timeline our working definition of CBA is: Any teacher-led classroom activity designed to find out about students’ performance on curriculum tasks that would yield information regarding their understanding as well as their need for further support and scaffolding with reference to their situated learning needs. (We recognise that not all CBA is teacher-led and that self and peer assessment may play an important role, but these aspects of CBA would warrant a timeline in their own right.) We further recognise that there have been shifts in the use of terms such as ‘foreign language’, ‘second language’ and ‘additional language’ in recent times. We will use ‘additional/second language’ as a catch-all term, but we will use ‘foreign’ and ‘second’ where it is representationally important to signal historical accuracy. Our timeline contains works from additional/second language research, and from the field of education more generally where appropriate.

Thus, our selection of themes is as follows:

1. A understanding of the conceptual basis (construct) of CBA

2. B implementation and enactment of CBA