Abstract
Performance pressure at both the institutional and individual level of secondary education has been identified as a pressure that is acknowledged all over Europe and raises questions about the extent to which agents in lower and upper secondary education interpret assessment in terms of either control or learning, or perhaps both. Drawing on empirical findings from two case studies in Denmark, the article focuses on the social roles of educational evaluation and assessment, and discusses the ways in which the local level interpretations of policy demands influence teaching and learning in secondary education. To enable an analysis of the understanding of different agents in the field, the article combines important sociological thinking with the basic distinction between assessment of programmes and assessment of individuals. Presuming that assessment practices bear the traces of the social structure that they both express and reproduce, the aim of this paper is to interrogate how the agents view and interpret such practices.
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Notes
This study is part of a post doctoral project by Annette Rasmussen on a social perspective on educational assessment.
The study of this department is part of a Ph.D. project by Nanna Friche on evaluation and assessment practices within vocational education and training in Denmark, conducted from 2007 to 2010.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a post doc grant by the Danish Research Council for Independent Research, Social Sciences (autumn 2006). In addition, we would like to thank our colleagues at the Centre for Education Policy Research for their encouragement and fruitful comments.
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Rasmussen, A., Friche, N. Roles of assessment in secondary education: Participant perspectives . Educ Asse Eval Acc 23, 113–129 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-010-9113-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-010-9113-z