Assessment in schools Fit for purpose? - Teaching and Learning ...

Education is recognised across the world as perhaps the most vital public
service of all. But how can we measure its effect? Assessment is essential to
allow individuals to get the educational support they need to succeed, to see
the effectiveness of different educational methods, and to ensure that education
budgets are being spent effectively. Inevitably, assessment also risks marking
teachers, learners and institutions as successes or failures.
This Commentary on assessment is a joint venture undertaken by the Teaching and Learning Research
Programme and the Assessment Reform Group. The TLRP has been the largest ESRC programme, carrying
out research into all aspects of education from preschool to adult and workplace learning. Many of its
projects have considered aspects of assessment, especially its highly impactful work on Assessment for
Learning.
The Assessment Reform Group has been in existence as an informal network for even longer than the
TLRP. Its emphasis has been on ways in which assessment can help to advance learning rather than merely
measuring it. This is expected to be the Group’s last major publication and it is a pleasure to pay tribute to
its contribution to advancing our ideas about appropriate ways of assessing educational outcomes.
Current developments in education, such as the rethinking of SATs as they are applied to schoolchildren
in England, suggest that the ARG’s views on the right and wrong way to assess educational progress are
having steadily more influence, and that TLRP research has helped to build the evidence needed to improve
assessment, and the educational outcomes which it is meant to underpin.
This is the thirteenth TLRP Commentary, and is intended like it predecessors to bring top-quality research to
practitioners, policy-makers and the interested public. We hope you enjoy it, and welcome your feedback via
our website www.esrc.ac.uk.
Professor Ian Diamond FBA AcSS
Chief Executive
The Economic and Social Research Council