Australia's Curriculum Dilemmas: State Cultures and the Big Issues by Lyn Yates

Author:Lyn Yates [Yates, Lyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Affairs & Administration
ISBN: 9780522857726
Google: kQSODwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 12575551
Publisher: MUP Academic
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part IV

When assessment comes into the picture

CHAPTER 10

The tail wagging the dog? Assessment and reporting

Cherry Collins

From its foundation, the graded primary school of Australia’s state schooling systems was built around assessment, around the drills of regular recitation and testing of students’ speed, accuracy and general levels of ‘proficiency’. These were regarded both as spurs to learning and as the basis for promotion up through its grades. When secondary schools became part of the system, assessment at the end of primary school was used in most states to sort students into different secondary school destinations. Reporting to parents, with letter grades (A+ to E) or percentage grades for each subject, was also an early practice. These within-system assessment practices are resonant as folk memories of what Australian schooling is all about. Indeed, the new Australian curriculum has made a populist return to old-fashioned A–E marks.

An entirely separate tradition is that of ‘high stakes’ external assessment at the end of schooling. Matriculation, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, came to involve written examinations, set outside the school, that students sat after four or five years of secondary schooling. While school bureaucracies structured and managed within-school assessment and grading, the university in each state prepared the examination papers and controlled the matriculation examination in its own state. In addition to matriculation examinations, the state university also administered the written, end of year, external examinations for levels of schooling below matriculation, including the Leaving Examination in several states and the examination held at approximately the end of compulsory attendance, known variously by state as the Intermediate/ Junior/School Certificate examination. These external, university-controlled hurdles became part of the Australian schooling tradition early in the twentieth century, and a rite of passage for several generations of students and employers.

Assessment in relation to the lower grades of school and high stakes assessment at the end of schooling have involved different stakeholder groups in separate arenas with distinctive debates and power struggles. In all states and territories except New South Wales there is no longer a Junior School Certificate examination and all Leaving examinations have long since disappeared. For those inside school systems, perhaps the strongest assessment focus below year 12 has been on lowering the stakes and the competitive tone of assessment in order to encourage rather than sort students. Politicians have recently imposed over this non-competitive approach, demands for between-schools competitive assessment of a variety of skills as a supposed means of raising standards.

The toning down of individual competitive assessment in the compulsory years is in marked contrast to what has happened at post-compulsory level. Here there has been fierce resistance to change in most states and assessment has remained both competitive and high stakes. The debates about post-compulsory assessment have consumed inordinate amounts of time and resources in most Australian states over the past thirty years.

The separate stories of assessment and reporting over the past generation at post-compulsory and compulsory schooling levels can be read as a parade of different assessment methods, an important series of experiments, each with its particular advocates and opponents.

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