ABSTRACT
In this chapter I examine these troubles and discuss problems in the assessment of learning. However, I shall not attempt to discuss the administrative minutiae of examining as it exists in public examination systems in anglophone countries such as the UK or the USA. To do that would be to accept an agenda for discussion as deeply flawed in its views on the assessment of learning as it is in its conception of teaching, and there are quite enough other books around that do this. Instead my concern will be with some more general questions that examine what seem to me to be fundamental issues about how we should try to assess pupils’ learning. Thus, although I am not unaware of the angst currently being experienced by large numbers of teachers in many countries trying to implement schemes imposed upon them by politicians and administrators, I shall
focus on ways in which teachers can develop an autonomous approach to testing that genuinely taps meaningful pupil learning. I hope that taking this line will help relieve the angst and enhance teachers’ confidence in their own approaches to assessment and enable them to seek out the flaws in methods handed down from above. I also hope that it may enable them to come to a realisation that many current problems besetting teaching have no roots, are likely to be transitory and are amenable to subversion.
