Flipping large-scale assessments

Abstract

‘Flipping the system’ must broaden the ways that expertise is put to work in education policy and practice. Over the past few decades, system-wide assessment has become a dominant tool that governments and education authorities use to influence student, teacher, classroom and school priorities. The rise of International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs), and their subsequent rankings, administered in national and sub-national contexts has changed the ways that the work of teachers and schools is represented and understood yet the voice of educators in interpreting these results is often missing. One problem is that the technical expertise used to create these assessments makes them very difficult to properly interpret for those without specialist knowledge and skills. Essentially, ILSA development takes place in ‘black boxes’. This ‘black boxing’ is a problem because the processes through which data are collected are directly linked to the question of how data should be validly interpreted. Given schools are required to use data to inform their practice, they may not have the expertise to do this effectively. This is the problem of displacement: expertise associated with ILSAs is displaced from the sites at which decisions are being made. The question is: What might be done? In this paper we propose that organisations that design, administer and analyse ILSAs, the education ministers and governments that pay for the tests, and the school systems that use them need to prioritise strategies for solving the problem of displacement. In this chapter we offer some simple strategies for addressing the problem of displacement by asking educators to engage in a validity conversation concerning the interpretation and use of ILSAs and their use by the policy community to measure quality educational systems.