ABSTRACT
Teachers’ professional judgement intervenes in all areas of their activity: when they plan and prepare learning activities; when they conduct lessons and decide which students to call on or how to adapt their initial lesson plan; when they interact with individual students and offer various forms of assistance; when they meet with parents to discuss a student’s progress; when they carry out formative and summative assessments in the classroom. We propose to qualify teachers’ judgement as ‘professional’ when it takes into account the resources and constraints of their work setting and is informed by professional knowledge acquired through experience and through training. In this paper, we will examine professional judgement in the area of summative assessment, and, in particular, the ways in which teachers determine the grades recorded in students’ report cards. After introducing the concept of professional judgement in assessment and the situated perspective that orients our research, we will present a study carried out with sixth-grade teachers working in public primary schools in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland.
