The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture

T his article is about classroom assessment--not the kind of assessments used to give grades or to satisfy the accountability demands of an external authority, but rather the kind of assessment 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 assessment practices cannot be accomplished in separate tests and measurement courses, but rather should be a central concern in teaching methods courses. The article is organized in three parts. I present, first, an historical f ramework highlighting the key tenets of social efficiency curricula, behaviorist learning theories, and "scientific measurement ." Next, I offer a contrasting socialconstructivisbconceptual framework that blends key ideas from cognitive, constructivist, and sociocultural theories. In the third part, I elaborate on the ways that assessment 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 t ime and purpose" (p. 291, emphasis added). As Graue notes, the measurement approach to classroom assessment, "exemplified by standardized tests and teacher-made emulations of those tests," presents a barrier to the implementat ion 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 F ~ I . A longerterm span of history helps us see that those measurement 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 assessment of s tudents ' 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 unders tand dissonant current practices, shown in the middle of the figure, is to realize that instruction (at least in its ideal form) is d rawn from the emergent paradigm, while testing is held over from the past. Historical Perspectives: Curriculum, Psychology, and Measurement