ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors present a number of key points in relation to how they see assessment functioning across the countries and highlights key cultural scripts that would be expected inevitably to shape local practices. They provide an example to show how the social order and the individual are constituted. Cultural scripts can be resisted and emerge in ongoing practice in various ways. Cultural scripts are useful for understanding how practice is organised and how people may be differently positioned to participate in a practice and so experience themselves as developing competence in it. In a sociocultural perspective, participants act and negotiate their meanings in the course of engaging with particular tasks within particular sets of relations, roles, interests and expectations, and broader institutional practices and imperatives. Policies and evaluative accounts of schools draw on ‘idealised’ notions of effective and ‘best’ practice and implicit theories of assessment and pedagogy.
