Assessment and learning in times of change and uncertainty

The year we left behind, 2021, was a year like no other, with the pandemic impacting students’ learning and assessment globally. While some countries have decided to open up, other countries have adopted a stricter approach and still use lockdown in areas of COVID outbreak. The impact of school lockdowns for students’ learning and the assessment of their achievements following pandemic will be the theme for a forthcoming Special Issue in this journal (O’Leary & Hayward to be published). What we already know, is that we are still in challenging times, where uncertainty is in the centre of our lives. Even worse, the uncertainty now includes dreadful scenes from the war in Ukraine, where children, instead of going to school and preparing for their exams this Spring, are fleeing their country in fear of bombs. Wars, whether they occur in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria, or Yemen, are taking away the future of a generation of children who should be living together peacefully, connecting through music and art, preparing for adulthood, and developing the skills to solve problems we have not yet discovered. In challenging times, with a global pandemic, wars and personal losses, it is worth reminding ourselves of the reasons so many of us committed our lives to education. In Europe, the President of the assessment organisation AEA-Europe, Dr Christina Wikström, made the following statement to members in March 2022: ‘We place our trust in all our members, irrespective of nationality, to always stand up for peace, democracy, and equality for all. We must also work together in our scholarly profession since scholarship is necessary for the survival and prosperity of humanity’ (Wikström, 2022). It is in this spirit we publish the first 2022 issue of Assessment in Education – knowing that education matters, and particularly in times of uncertainty and challenges. As an international journal, we hope that researchers will continue to connect, collaborate, and stand up for the values which enhance learning for all students, no matter which continent they live on. We owe it to them to offer aspirations for the future, and quality education for all can provide that hope. In the first article in this regular issue, Steinmann et al. (this issue) presents findings from a study investigating the reliability of questionnaire scales. Student self-report scales have been known for their limitations, both with respect to validity and reliability (Samuelstuen & Bråten, 2007; Samuelstuen et al., 2007), but the current study specifically investigates the use of mixed wording in items used in international large-scale studies. More specifically, students were asked to report their agreement on items, such as ‘I usually do well in mathematics’ and ‘I am just not good at mathematics’, mixing positive and negative statements. Steinmann et al. used data from the international IEA studies PIRLS and TIMSS 2011, to further investigate how students responded to these scales, and demonstrated that 2–36% of ASSESSMENT IN EDUCATION: PRINCIPLES, POLICY & PRACTICE 2022, VOL. 29, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2022.2068480