Fair measures

Many forms of assessment have been tried in schools. The current UK secondary curriculum is based on a combination of summative (exams) and continuous (project based) forms of assessment, and is thought to be fair because it measures learner performance over a long period of time. And yet this approach to assessment is flawed. It's flawed because it is based on a criterion referenced system which expects all children within a given subject area (and usually within the same age group) to perfom at a previously defined level of cognitive performance. It is a standardised testing system which is applied to learning - something that can never be 'standard'. It is fairer than an exam only based assessment where a pass or a fail may depend on the health or emotional state of the student at the time of the test. It is also fairer than norm referenced testing, which pits students against each other. But it is still unfair for students who may not have the ability to perform at the expected criterion level. Many students subsequently fail and are stigmatised as a result of criterion referenced assessment. But it's the best we have, I hear some of you say. Well, if that's true, then we're in real trouble.

There's an alternative. A fairer, and more personalised form of assessment is ipsative assessment. This is where learners are measured against their own previous performances. Ipsative forms of assessment have been successfully used for children with special educational needs. It measures individual progress. It is also a form of informal measurement of skill for children who compete against themselves in video games or in sports to guage physical skills. There is no motivation better than competing against yourself. If you fail, no-one is able to pass judgement on you but yourself. If you succeed, that's the spur to push yourself onwards to gain even better skills or higher levels of knowledge.

How would ipsative assessment work in formal classroom settings? Well, there are already some hybid versions of ipsative assessment being practiced by some schools. For example, Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) is a means of measuring a learning over a period of time using students' own previous attainment scores and mapping them against their current ones. APP is good for tracking progress of individuals over time and it also helps teachers to diagnose a pupil's learning issues and deficits early and to make intervention as required. But how about letting students set their own criteria for assessment? How about some kind of negotiation with the teacher about what should be learnt and how it should be measured? Wouldn't this be more personal? Radical perhaps, and possibly more time consuming, but it's more personal too, and if it improves learning, wouldn't it be worth the extra effort?

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Fair measures by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.