Redefining assessment? The first ten years of assessment in education

The completion of the first ten years of this journal is an occasion for review and reflection. The main issues that have been addressed over the ten years are summarized in four main sections: Purposes, International Trends, Quality Concerns and Assessment for Learning. Each of these illustrates the underlying significance of the themes of principles, policy and practice, which the journal highlights in its subtitle. The many contributions to these themes that the journal has published illustrate the diversity and complex interactions of the issues. They also illustrate that, across the world, political and public pressures have had the effect of enhancing the dominance of assessment so that the decade has seen a hardening, rather than any resolution, of its many negative effects on society. A closing section looks ahead, arguing that there is a move to rethink more radically the practices and priorities of assessment if it is to respond to human needs rather than to frustrate them.     

Developing an Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory: the ELLI Project

This paper reports the initial results of a study that was designed to develop and test an instrument that could identify the elements of an individual's capacity for lifelong learning. We anticipated that the components of this capacity would include a complex mix of dispositions, lived experiences, social relations, values, attitudes and beliefs and that these various factors would coalesce to shape the nature of an individual's engagement with any particular learning opportunity. The instrument that was developed—the Evaluating Lifelong Learning Inventory—was trialled with pupils across a range of ages and subject to factor analytic study. The data have proved robust over successive factor analytic studies, allowing the identification of seven dimensions of learning power and reliable scales to assess these. These dimensions appear to be capable of differentiating between efficacious, engaged and energized learners and passive, dependent and fragile learners. Whilst further, larger scale field trials will be necessary to confirm these early results, the findings would appear to have significant implications for conventional models of curriculum design and classroom practice.     

Stones from Other Hills may Serve to Polish the Jade of this One: towards a neo‐comparative ‘learnology’ of education

This is a revised version of the 1998 Presidential address to the newly‐inaugurated British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE). The paper reviews the tension within the history of comparative education between qualitative, culturally‐focused studies and more positivist approaches. It explores the dangers, as well as the possibilities, inherent in the rapidly‐growing interest in comparative studies. It argues that the advent of postmodernism presents a new challenge for comparativists that requires culture to be accorded a central place in efforts to understand educational organisations and practices. Finally, the paper outlines the desirable characteristics of a ‘neo‐comparative’ education, of a comparative ‘learnology’ which integrates a range of different social science perspectives, and is both rigorous and radical.     

The changing nature of assessment in English primary classrooms: Findings from the PACE project 1989–1997

The effective use of evaluation is currently hailed as the ultimate tool in raising standards and ensuring accountability for virtually all areas of life. Nowhere has this been more in evidence than in the area of schooling. This increasing emphasis on target setting and the raising of standards through summative assessment has brought with it major changes to the educative experience for both teachers and their pupils. The PACE Project, which began in 1989, was designed to track these changes as they impacted on a representative sample of teachers and their pupils as they progressed through primary schooling. This article highlights some of the major issues which have emerged from the study and goes on to discuss what implications these might have for future policy-making.     

Assessment Policy and Inequality: the United Kingdom experience

The UK is typical of many industrialised countries at the present time in searching for new kinds of assessment procedure which will be appropriate on the one hand to the goals of the more vocational curricula currently being developed and, on the other, be relevant to the whole range of pupil needs and achievement. The paper explores the impetus behind such changes and argues that the policies so generated embody a number of political and educational contradictions. Using recent developments in England and Scotland as a case study, the paper argues that, despite their egalitarian potential in educational terms, the underlying political climate of cost‐efficiency and laissez‐faire individualism which in turn inhibits any substantial change in traditional educational values is likely to result in reinforced, rather than reduced social divisions being associated with such initiatives.