ABSTRACT
Assessment has become one of the most significant areas of interest in educational policy dev-elopment worldwide. This is occurring in relation to emergent educational systems as well as in the context of government interventions in established systems. There is a growing awareness of the limited scope and the limiting effects on teaching, learning and motivation of some traditional forms of assessment. This awareness, together with international economic and employment trends, has in recent years heralded interest in new forms of assessment. The importance of assessment for influencing teaching and curricula has not been lost on governments. Politicians are increasingly aware that what is taught, and how, can be indirectly asserted through the control of ‘high stakes’ assessment programmes (Torrance 1995; Broadfoot 1996). In multi-cultural, post-industrial societies, the trend towards a centrally prescribed content of assessed know-ledge increasingly clashes with assertions of the cultural and social differences and diversity of experience and need among populations of students. Reacting to claims for more culturally diverse representations, architects of national testing in the United States and the United Kingdom now assert the existence of underlying shared values as a basis of national unity. They make plain their belief that an alternative vision, of an underlying cultural homogeneity, can be overtly constructed and promoted through a nationally assessed body of knowledge (Berlak, see Chapter 10).
