ABSTRACT
Any review of assessment and testing must recognise from the outset that the two terms imply quite different approaches to the identification and reporting of educational achievement. Thus educational assessment can be carried out by a variety of means, including the collection of evidence of routine student performance produced under ordinary classroom conditions; and it can be reported descriptively, in narrative form, rather than simply as a numerical score or grade. It is generally considered to involve a more holistic and rounded set of activities than simply sitting one-off, paper-and-pencil tests or final examination papers. In this respect assessment might be considered a generic term which can include testing (though more commonly ‘educational assessment’ is thought of as antithetical to ‘testing’), and in most contexts of debate the terms represent opposite ends of a continuum of approaches to identifying and describing educational achievement.
