ABSTRACT

Because systems of assessment are required to fulfil complex roles in modern societies, there is frequently a mismatch between policy intentions and outcomes. For example, contrasting with the intentions described above, many people argue that frequent mass testing in American schools has actually served to compound and perpetuate educational and social disparity, rather than alleviate it (see for example, US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment 1992; DarlingHammond 1994). In Chapter 2 can be found an example of this concern. There, Mark LaCelle-Peterson reveals ways in which policy and test technologies embody hidden values such that they fail to represent the broad range of educational experience and needs of students. He reveals that the number and proportion of students whose first language is not English are increasing in US schools. It would be thought, he argues, that the needs of such students would figure largely within a system that is seeking to improve academic standards. Yet ‘standards’ are being pursued through the expansion of large-scale, undifferentiated assessment programmes, a policy which assumes that learners are a homogenous population. LaCelle-Peterson discusses ways in which tests, inappropriately structured for English-language learners, with culturally inappropriate knowledge content, serve to limit and distort rather than reveal the attainments of language minorities. They serve to obscure the educational needs of such pupils rather than support them. Readers will find further discussions of the relationship between inequitable assessment outcomes and factors relating to social class, gender and racial or cultural difference throughout this book.