ABSTRACT
Within education assessment practices and their consequences have been a crucially important and contentious area for many years. Their importance is even more manifest now as the current government attempts to engage in a massive programme of curricular and pedagogic change through the control of assessment and certification procedures. Given that the potentially negative educational consequences of assessment have long been identified, for example the narrowing ‘backwash’ effect of the 11+ on the primary school curriculum highlighted almost as soon as the 11+ was instigated after the Second World War, and given that sociologists such as Michael Young began asking questions about the determination of examination syllabuses and methods almost twenty years ago (Young, 1971), it is strangely paradoxical that such a vitally important field of inquiry remains largely unexplored. This is not to suggest that assessment and examinations research has not taken place, it has, and indeed for perhaps thirty years from the 1920s to the 1950s research on assessment was virtually synonymous with educational research, boosted as it was by the developing administrative imperative of selecting children for grammar school. But this research took place in the context of a concern to identify and measure individual differences and its substance and methodology were primarily technical rather than educational. Assessment was taken as both a topic of enquiry and a research tool with investigations centring on the validity and reliability of a particular test or tests. Even work which questioned the consequences of testing (for example, Floud and Halsey, 1957; Yates and Pidgeon 1957) largely took the methods for granted.
