ABSTRACT
Given the centrality of assessment in public education, it is essential to address how the eight competences can be assessed. This chapter begins with a discussion of the tyranny of assessment, where simplistic measures tend to force teachers to abandon many approaches that might foster mastery of the eight competences but may not boost scores. The emotional cost of high-stakes testing also is considered, and a section of the chapter discusses how testing might be done positively and without doing harm. This is followed by a discussion of stealth assessment, a technique introduced by Valerie Shute to embed continual microassessments into online learning and practice opportunities. Much of the eight competences and their elements will be hard to assess using traditional “objective” techniques. Accordingly, the chapter discusses how more complex competence is tested in many other countries, using social moderation of qualitative scoring of student performances that is supported by explicit scoring rubrics. This section of the chapter reinforces an earlier theme that effective assessment of deeper instructional goals depends on a level of trust that teachers and other learning supporters are acting and assessing outcomes in honest ways. Transparency of assessment approaches is critical to the development of this trust. A final point developed in the chapter is the importance of avoiding excessive micromanagement of those who provide learning opportunities for our children. The complexity of the needed educational activity is such that those supporting children’s learning need to have the freedom to experiment with their own ideas about how best to do this. In an ideal arrangement, continual formative assessment will allow teachers and other learning supporters to innovate while continually checking to see whether their novel ideas really work.
