ABSTRACT
Assessment is an important area in education; it is needed to judge the success of any teaching and learning and thus to inform the design and adaptation of plans for future learning. In recent years, particularly following the publication of Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam’s (1990) Inside the Black Box, a greater distinction has been made between summative and formative assessment, the former being a judgement about what has been learnt and the latter focusing on what still needs to be learnt. However, there is always a danger that assessment dominates teaching and learning, and encourages ‘teaching to the test’. Consideration of assessment also raises serious questions about what should be, and what actually is being assessed; it seems that we often value what we assess, but do not always assess what we value. As Chapter 18 explores, debates about the nature of progression in history – particularly about the different kinds of knowledge that need to be combined in developing historical understanding, and the extent to which they can be developed independently of each other – make the process of assessment similarly complex and contested. Certain kinds of knowledge may seem easier to assess than others, prompting assessment systems to prioritise particular kinds of knowledge or to treat each of them in isolation. These challenges are explored in the extracts within this chapter, which address fundamental questions about how assessment should be conducted in order to inform students and teachers – as well as wider stakeholders – about the students’ learning.
