Learning Conversations

This is part 4 of a series of posts about an alternative education system.

Assessment has many purposes. It is used to help point the way forward for individual learners. It is used to provide a simple means of judging an individual's performance and capability for future challenges. And it's used as a blunt instrument to compare the performance of different educational institutions.

All of these are valid. But the measure of the institution's performance (and thus the driver of future funding) often drives the priorities for the individual. So we may find a school measured on English, Maths & Science results will focus heavily on these aspects, regardless of the individual's capabilities in Music, Art or Languages.

With a holistic curriculum that is more closely aligned to today's society, and assessment looking at the all aspects of that curriculum we ought to be able to minimise the impact of assessing particular aspects.

We'll still need (well society will say we will) some easily digestible measure of both school and individual performance.

A combination of internally-moderated teacher assessment (against clear criteria), ratified through the use of external moderators, appears the best option. We do need to move away from the current, politically-driven centralised testing & marking systems. Whatever system we choose needs to be seen to be open, fair and free from bias.

Assessment is, in some ways the hardest part of developing an alternative education system. It is the main means by which the system interfaces with the rest of society. So it needs to be able to be understood & trusted by society. Yet, at the same time, it needs to be granular and holistic enough to be useful to the individual.