Political Aspects of Assessment

How a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control (Bernstein 1971, p. 47);

You get what you assess; you don’t get what you don’t assess; you should build assessment towards what you want…to teach… (Resnick and Resnick 1992, p. 59).

Introduction

The above quotations demonstrate that politics, and political choices, infuse and permeate every aspect of assessment design and use. Everything that a society values cannot be taught in school, choices about curriculum content and teaching methods have to be made. In turn, everything that is taught cannot be assessed; again, choices have to be made, samples have to be constructed (via test items of various kinds). Thus what is assessed represents, and in practice comes to be regarded, as the most important elements of educational experience and curriculum content. This is sometimes known as the...