Assessment as a strategic issue

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Assessment as a strategic issue

• Dr Trish Glasby
• Assessment New Basics Branch
• Department of Education and the Arts

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• Societal, economic and technological changes are
  transforming the world of work

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• The role of agencies of government (schools,
  universities) is to specify and develop generic
  and industry-specific competencies in all
  students

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• Schools and universities function in corporate
  fashion to produce flexible and multi-skilled
  workers necessary for the global economy

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• All students must learn
• how to communicate
• to think and reason effectively
• to solve complex problems
• to work with multi-dimensional data and
  sophisticated representations
• to collaborate in teams
• to demonstrate self motivation

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• Drive for reform and corporatization of
  schooling has lead to an emphasis on the
  productivity of education with performance
  indicators for measuring outputs

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• Knowledge has become a major stake in the
  worldwide competition for power
• The nature of knowledge has been and continues to
  be transformed

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• How a society selects, classifies, distributes,
  transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge
  it considers to be public, reflects both the
  distribution of power and the principles of
  control (Bernstein)

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• Education is about disciplining the body and
  binding it into the social order (Foucault)

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• Power exists in the apparatus of regulation
  (Walkerdine)

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• Pedagogic discourse

Instructional discourse
Regulative discourse
(Bernstein)
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• Instructional discourse regulates the rules of
  specialized competencies i.e. what and how
  particular competencies and skills of various
  kinds will be transmitted

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• Regulative discourse orders the relationships
  between teachers, students and their contexts. It
  is the dominate discourse creating social order,
  social relations and social identity

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• Pedagogic discourse is a principle for bringing
  specialized discourses into a relationship with
  each other for the purpose of creating order

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• Every assessment is based on
• a theory of what students know
• how students develop competence in a subject
  domain
• tasks or situations used to collect evidence
  about student performance
• a method for drawing inferences from evidence

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What ideas are impacting on your assessment
practices?

• corporatization of your institution
• changing expectations of the world of work
• the knowledge economy and its transformation
• student identification with the institution
• the relationship between learning and assessment

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What ideas are impacting on your assessment
practices? contd

• formation of student identity as a CQU graduate
• the regulation of awarded grades
• what student learning is considered important
• how student learning is assessed
• the nature of your assessment

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What ideas are impacting on your assessment
practices? contd

• the fairness and equity of your assessment
• use of well designed assessment tasks
• determination of quality criteria and appropriate
  standards descriptors
• the inclusion of models of assessment responses
  within course work

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What ideas are impacting on your assessment
practices? contd