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0:13
Thank you Guoxing and if it gives you pleasure to welcome everyone here today you can imagine how much pleasure it gives me to have this opportunity of launching the book and also speaking and listening to other people discussing it. I'd like to start if I may just with a few thank yous because i have to express my enormous gratitude to the School of Education
0:44
to be able to celebrate this collected works book most of which was produced in the Bristol University School of Education where I worked for some 30 years so this feels right to be here tonight. I'd like to take this opportunity of thanking my fellow presenters who are each going to speak for about 10 minutes to highlight different aspects of the book and I'd like to thank you Guoxing, for all your support and help in bringing this event to birth
1:15
and indeed for Christie who we're relying on tonight and has also done a great deal to make things happen. Thank you to Sarah Hyde who is here from Routledge as the publisher of the book and who will speak briefly later and thank you to all of you from I think around the world many of you who are zooming in tonight I'm sorry there isn't any wine but I hope the event will be interesting enough to make up for that. I would like also to take this opportunity of recognising
1:49
that not all of what's being celebrated in this book tonight was single-handedly done by me everybody knows that research is a team effort and some of the teams that I've worked with all of whom have been wonderful and brilliant and fun, some representatives of those teams are here I won't single out individuals but I'd like to recognize that your contribution is as significant as mine in many of the papers included in the book and if you'll forgive me
2:23
I would like just to thank my family who are also here tonight, my husband and my children and their partners because the book is dedicated to them and their forbearance for all the years that I spent writing various papers so to our topic does a sociology of assessment matter? This is really a topic I've tried to persuade students about over all the years that I was teaching them that it
2:55
does indeed matter profoundly and I hope it will convince you tonight through our discussion quite how important a sociology of assessment is. I guess some of you think it's a bit of a grandiose term
3:12
a sociology of assessment but if you give a minutes thought to the panoply of assessment activities that go on in our world today they're certainly an inextricable aspect of life in educational institutions. We think about examinations and qualifications and targets and league tables and increasingly of data. So there's a huge case for understanding impact of those kinds of activities on every aspect of our social life. Obviously the focus of my book
3:54
is on assessment in education but the issues are broadly similar if you took a different context
4:02
and so really what I want very briefly to mention in this introduction really is a brief word picture of the book, perhaps you'd have the next slide please christie
4:22
I guess when you start out an academic career you don't really know where it's going to take you and I don't believe anybody who thinks they do and in the field of education in particular our focus on what we want to research often changes in response to changes in policy and international fashions and trends. Some of you, a few of you perhaps will know that my career started by accident when I was
4:53
recruited as a very junior researcher to work on a project in Scotland run by the Head Teachers Association of Scotland called pupil profiles. It was a an effort to find an alternative way of certificating young youngsters who would not get exams results when they left school.
5:17
Over the years my research morphed through records of achievement into national curriculum and assessment research and later on into assessment for learning and last but I think perhaps most profoundly my latest interest in technology enhanced e-assessment
5:42
but two constant threads run through this book which have woven my work together, one of them is my initial training as a sociologist and the other is my training which I acquired largely through my master's degree in comparative education.
6:02
I now believe quite passionately that using different education systems to compare how education is delivered at different levels nationally, regionally, even locally,
6:17
is the only real laboratory that sociologists have and early on I thought about the constants and the contexts in educational provision that vary. Some things don't vary across different cultures and other things do and a sociologist wants to understand why that is and so that's why the book is subtitled comparative and policy perspectives because it does draw on these different themes and it includes both theoretical writing and also extracts from
6:58
a whole series of major empirical studies mostly comparative studies which I have been involved in
7:07
so if we turn to slide three, this illustrates part one of the book and it's the bit that I hope Joanne's going to focus on in a minute but early on it came to me that
7:24
it's important to understand the functions that assessment plays in education and society or for society the first of these is the recognition of people's competence in a given activity and then after that comes and came the use of examinations to provide for competition between competent people so leading to selection and then perhaps less often recognized is the role that assessment plays in education in shaping the content of education and finally
8:08
the way in which increasingly now and as Stephen has so well written about the way in which assessment now controls almost every aspect of education or provision so those four C's have lived with me throughout my career: competence, competition, content and control.
8:31
If we then move to slide four covers part two of the book and illustrates the various empirical studies which are form part two of the book some of them comparing England and France and one of them including Denmark as well. Slide five which we're coming to now is part three of the book which is very topical now. When we look at
9:10
the increasingly important role that assessment is playing in policy discourse so many policy initiatives that you might see in education which we can see relate to assessment at the present time and that leads very naturally into the part of the book, the last part of the book which deals with something I've called the assessment society, it was a term that I toyed with for the title of the book but it's perhaps a bit too limited but
9:45
how we live now and how relatively new insights now are emerging too around assessment that has a completely different purpose, assessment which is designed not to measure learning but to promote it, and I think many people are very excited in the world of education that we might be on a threshold of a very different world of how we use assessment and I guess that's why I'm so interested in whether technology that has transformed so much of our lives already
10:24
can also transform and improve the way we use assessment which is perhaps
10:34
going away a little bit from thinking about it merely sociologically .
10:40
I felt I must at the end of the book add a new piece about covid and I just want to say a sentence or two about that because the crisis that we're living through and indeed the cancellation of examinations that we've seen unprecedentedly in the last year strikes me that it might just open up a new opportunity for radical change in the way that we do things and so in that postscript I unashamedly muse about the good things that might
11:20
come out of the changes we're being forced to accept at the present time. So that's an absolutely whistle-stop tour of what's in my book the Sociology of Assessment: Comparative and policy perspectives. If you were to read it from page one to page, I don't know 1003, I hope that by the end of it you would be convinced that a sociology of assessment matters. It is important for us to understand what we're doing with one of the most powerful tools that exists in society to
12:05
shape our aspirations our constraints our anxieties and almost everything that we do in social life so with that and with that challenge I'll hand over to Joanne.
12:31
Thanks very much Trisha can I just check you can hear me?
12:36
Yes, well I have to say that before reading this book obviously I knew of Trisha's work and I have very much enjoyed being in dialogue with that again over the past while and during this period as Director of the department in Oxford University I have been captured by the research excellence framework so I read the book with irony about the effects of my current work upon me and the control of us all as individuals
13:15
and it also occurred to me what the opportunity costs of this were and all of this exercise how it's chewed up people's time and that's one of the issues I think that arises from Patricia's work I'm really really pleased to see that this book has been included in the world library of educationalist series certainly her work would have been one of my picks and because it's distinctive and it's added really a different voice to the field and Stephen's introduction
13:49
he mentions that it's almost a history of assessment as well over the past few decades
13:56
so certainly Trish is a great thinker and we see that throughout the book
14:03
and she's just said her work was a kind of precursor to the
14:08
technological surveillance that we now have in this modern era and and also in the age of the algorithm and AI so it's a really really interesting read this. Although
14:24
Trisha talks about this as a sociology of assessment, at times it feels like it goes beyond that it's more of a philosophy because the theorizing is much broader than just looking at different groups and how assessment affects society so I'd like to just look at this quotation from Sir Angus Deaton, he's talking about here he's talking about Covid
14:53
and he makes the point that in pandemics of yesteryear and black death and so on there really was very little that the upper classes or the middle classes could do to escape the pandemic or to to do better in it but now of course we see that that is absolutely not the case in Covid, that the middle classes and the upper classes have much better health outcomes and his point is that the rich will do better than the poor whenever there's a mechanism for them to do so and I
15:29
think traditionally, through the idea of meritocracy, it's been seen that assessment is a route for middle class families to make sure that their kids do better in life and this is really the explanation about why we have the kinds of inequalities that we have the different routes through the education system and the assessment system consolidates that. Well in this book Trisha makes the point plainly that that's not all that's going on and she
16:06
talks about the social legitimation that occurs but also the crisis in that legitimation and she talks about the fact that schools are not just assessing through the formal assessments either.
16:21
So, uncharacteristically I'd like to recount an anecdote if you don't mind. Throughout my schooling I had free school meals, but did well in assessment, so you could say that was a great success of the rationality of assessment and what it can do to emancipate people from different backgrounds. So obviously my school must have been doing a good job of that rational assessment, right? Well let me just tell you about one of the experiences I had where
16:58
I heard tell that there was going to be a class, a small class of people who could take three sciences so that appealed to me I thought I would be the kind of person who could benefit from doing all three sciences and I put it down on my form
17:17
Lo and behold a few weeks later I was called to the headmaster's office so I sat outside thinking I haven't done anything that he knows about so I can't really see what this is going to be about
17:31
and when I got in there he explained to me carefully, how it was going to be a small class for three sciences and how this wasn't something for me. So just note I'm there on my own without parental support, none of that's going on and then eventually when I did get the opportunity to speak, he was really dismissing me, I said, so what are the criteria then for taking these three sciences and he explained that you'd really have to do well in your exams so I asked him what
18:04
it was about my report cards that meant I couldn't take three sciences and it was then that he looked
18:12
so then he noticed that I actually had all grade A's so somewhere in that school they'd decided that I wasn't the kind of person who should take three sciences, so the judgments were much much broader, and the channeling and filtering of all the opportunities is clearly still there. So forgive me for the anecdote but I think that it's actually quite hard to bring this stuff alive unless you see the the lived experiences of people and in this section of the book
18:49
Trisha talks about, I mean she very authoritatively draws on the work of all the great and the good Weber, Durkheim, Bernstein and Foucault but she channels it and links it more carefully to the realities and practicalities of educational assessment she draws out the main themes of their work and talks about how individualism has made these themes then are connected with assessment in a way that make them legitimate the kinds of inequalities that we have
19:28
so it's a very broad piece because she's really talking about how society is shaped not just the individual experiences but here when she talks about individualism, for example,
19:44
she's looking at how ideologies are legitimated through the focus on the individual when she looks at our rational authority, she's talking about the idea that we're no longer talking about values, it's now become a technical approach to how people are to be evaluated. And all of this legitimating where we end up as a society
20:15
So
20:19
she talks about the legitimation crisis that we have
20:24
and draws upon Habermas there as well the point she makes is that wealth is socially produced, again talking based on his work, that wealth is socially produced, and it goes on to be distributed unequally and that this has to be legitimated somehow so she argues that assessment plays a large part in that. So in dialogue with this work and obviously a lot of these pieces were published earlier, the kinds of things I'd like to be talking toTtrisha about now are
21:05
what does legitimation look like in 2021? So, as she said, she's produced another chapter that looked at what happened in 2020, we saw the issues around the algorithm and how the legitimation actually didn't work. It wasn't that they were new inequalities in fact the inequalities were slightly better if anything than previously but it was the legitimation that caused the crisis which I think is really fascinating. We've also got issues with legitimation because the whole
21:42
idea of meritocracy was partly about how you were channeled in the industrialization era. Well the market value of qualifications is really questionable now. Where is the labour market for school leaving kids? What it's going to look like in the future is another issue and I think really fascinating I think Trisha has always been looking to the future in her work and her interest in e-assessment and AI is all part of that but I think really fascinating in
22:18
this area too, is what is production in the modern era? What does it look like? It's virtual, it's not the same as it was in the past and it's so hard to see how assessment is going to legitimate the inequalities in the way that it did in the future, so I think all of this feels like we're on a cusp of quite a different logic behind educational assessment.
22:49
So thank you very much for asking me to look at your work again Trisha. As you see I've thoroughly enjoyed it and it's really made me rethink a lot of the the issues that are current.
23:15
I don't think it's for me to say but I think Steven's going to speak next. Thank you Joanne.
23:33
Hi good afternoon, nice to meet you all in this virtual space and thank you Trisha for inviting me to participate and also inviting me to write the preface to the book which I was very pleased and honored to do Trisha and I in several respects grew up together in the sociology of education over a number of decades and we bumped into each other at all sorts of moments and events and activities in that time and it was always a pleasure to talk to and
24:12
debate with Trisha and it's wonderful to see her papers being collected together in this book most of which I realized when I when I saw the contents, I'd already read which was which was very nice and what what you can see in the book reading across the papers is the the incredible breadth and complexity of Trisha's work and Joanne's already alluded to this in terms of the the range of sources, the scope of the analysis and what she brings to bear in that.
24:55
Although the other thing that struck me when when Joanne was talking, sometimes it's a simple thing that somebody says and sticks in your mind. It relates to the decades that Patricia and I share as well, that when I went to school everybody had free school meals,
25:18
there wasn't anybody who didn't, but that's neither here nor there. Tricia was essentially and I think accurately, the first sociologist of education to take assessment seriously as a topic the other, what Basil Bernstein calls the three message systems of schooling pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. Curriculum and assessment were well attended to in sociology of education but assessment wasn't and and one of the important things that Tricia did
25:56
was to make it into a problem to make it into something that was sociologically important and sociologically interesting and you can see all that in the book and I was thinking about the end points of the book and the idea of assessment society that Trisha mentioned but in some ways assessment is not the end of things in terms of what we have now, it's also the beginning of things in terms of how schooling and state schooling started,
26:34
for example through the the system of payment by results in in the late 19th century which bears an uncanny resemblance to the regime of assessment which operates now in schools. The three message systems, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment produced the fundamental building blocks of schooling but assessment itself was borrowed from elsewhere it came from the military and from the civil service as a technology for managing a modern institution
27:07
and it applies as Trisha said earlier on across a whole range of other institutions, but it's fundamentally a modernist device for organizing institutions and organizing the people within those institutions and what it did and what it does now more than anything else is actually provide for processes of normalization, division and exclusion. It categorizes people, it divides people, it ranks, it compares people, it makes it possible to
27:41
relate them to particular identities or more profoundly subjectivities and in in many cases it also relates to their impossibility as educational subjects by excluding them either internally or externally. It's an incredibly powerful mechanism for working on the social subject and producing the social subject.
28:15
And it continues today in ever more sophisticated forms. We've moved away from a system which began by drawing from the military and from the civil service to a system which has drawn its contemporary iteration and articulation of assessment from business in the form of performance management and this I think is itself very telling. And then the school is aligned with a range of other institutions in a different way. In the 19th century as Foucault says
28:55
schools and prisons and hospitals were essentially the same but now the situation is that schools and businesses are essentially the same that they're all involved in producing forms of surplus value, the school produces that indirectly in terms of capital or labor, and more directly in the terms of performance. It produces individual and collective performances which are then consumed in various ways but are also compared in various ways and and as Trisha explores
29:34
in more than one paper in the book, performance management as a technique is incredibly powerful.
29:43
It works as as Michael Barber puts it, to provide a mechanism of deliverology what he calls deliverology which links the student's desk to the minister's desk. The minister can manipulate, change, alter the rules of play in terms of the forms of assessment that operate or the targets that are set or the benchmarks that are set and they, through various mediations, impinge very directly on the school experience
30:20
of the student, how the classroom is organized, how the teacher makes decisions about how they use their time and attention and energy in relation to different students, who are valued differently in relation to their ability to contribute to the performance value of the institution.
30:39
And that is the technique of performance management, the ability to drive and lead a system from the top without actually requiring that you lay down a set of procedures. What you do is you manipulate the requirements for outcomes.
31:01
And this in a way it kind of explains the global dissemination of these forms of assessment and their attraction to politicians around the world, as people like Pasi Sahlberg talk about it in terms of, what he calls GERM, the global education reform movement, assessment and assessment technologies are one of the key aspects of reform almost wherever you look because it places in the hands of politicians this enormously powerful set of
31:42
of possibilities, so that assessment provides for the management of performance and the management of performance allows for the management of behavior,
31:56
so this becomes a technology which not only has an economic effect, it also has a political and subjective effect in terms of the way that it operates in schools.
32:11
And for me the other contemporary issue about assessment which again Trisha touches on a number of times in the book, is that it's now rendered into the form of a neo-liberal double as I would call it, that it it allows for, provides for and delivers, both governance - as a way of managing individuals in the population - and profit at the same time, because assessment is now an opportunity for business to make profit from education and it's one
32:52
of a multitude of such opportunities which operate across systems and within schools and we can see this, we can see this very starkly now in the violent shift towards remote learning that there are hundreds of businesses which are jostling for remote learning opportunities that they can sell to schools, to governments, to parents, to operate in relation to their own children. So we see, for example, recently, people, i'm
33:28
sure people know, that both google and microsoft offered their suite of educational resources free to schools in the period from March to September 2020, and in in the process signed up tens of thousands of new account holders and thousands of schools as subscribers. And in that suite of resources, assessment is one of the facilities that they offer.
34:05
And businesses like Pearson offer the full suite of all educational technologies, you can essentially buy an educational institution online which will offer you curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and management, things like admissions procedures,
34:25
and you can operate that through their systems but also of course, within the limits of their systems. So I think that's where we are now, and that's where Trisha gets to at the end of her book. I suppose I would finish by saying, and we've visited this before I think, Trisha and I, on occasion, I think Trisha still has the notion that assessment in some way is redeemable that there can be good assessment. I think I've come to the
34:59
view that assessment is irredeemable and as foucault would put it in relation to assessment that not all assessment is bad, but all assessment is dangerous. Thank you Patricia and good luck with the book. I hope lots and lots of people read it, because they should.
35:23
Thank you very much Stephen. Let's welcome Tansy. Good evening everyone, it's a real privilege and honour to be speaking at this book launch. I speak as one of Patricia's successors in the PVC Education role at Bristol and want to welcome her back. It's fantastic to have this book launch which reflects so much of her career at Bristol. Here I also speak as someone who has plowed my own furrow, my research furrow, in assessment in higher
35:54
education, and I note from the conversations here how in the school sector there's been much more of a sociological tilt about thinking through assessment than there has in the higher education sector which has lent heavily on cognitive psychology and the deep and surface learning movement and I think it's only Sarah Mann from Glasgow and Jennifer Case from Cape Town who've really pressed the bar on a sociological understanding of assessment.
36:25
So I speak as someone who has.. I wouldn't call myself a sociologist.. I'm an amateur, but I'm interested in it. I also speak as someone who believes that we need to base our assessment on the rational and the intuitive, on the objective and the personal, and we need to invite students to enjoy and not only endure assessment and I probably, Stephen, speak on the camp of feeling it's redeemable, rather than irredeemable, dangerous but
36:57
redeemable. I loved reading the book. I spent my Saturday reading what was for me a panoramic view of 40 years of research on assessment. I thought it was fascinating. I thought it gave a classic and clean and wide-ranging sociological analysis. I loved traversing through Basil Bernstein's theories in the book, you know, I've touched on them before but I just thought it was so beautifully written. I thought there was a deep sense of
37:30
pedagogy and for me, obviously getting to the end of the book, which looked at assessment for learning which I'm speaking about now in the digital revolution, it touched on much of my interest and work around formative assessment, assessment for learning and digital pedagogies. So I'll start by just touching on the assessment for learning part of the book and then I'll move on to the digital revolution. So for me Patricia raises the question that if we take the view that
37:59
assessment is about more than measurement and accountability then I think it's relational, cultural and emotional dimensions come into view. In her own words, assessment is part of the pervasive and personal relationship between teacher and taught. If that is so we can't rely on two summative assessments a term in higher education, to measure performance in every module, anonymously marked, often by a person other than the teacher, to build a pedagogic
38:36
relationship. If we look at David Nichols work from Strathclyde, he says that students are often disappointed by their feedback, we see this in the national student survey, and give it a thumbs down because in their feedback they're looking for a pedagogic relationship that they don't find in mass higher education, instead they find what he describes is a fractured and fragmented discourse. So, if two summative assessments per semester won't do it in higher education, what will?
39:08
In the chapter on assessment for learning, Patricia says it: to fully understand the potential and significance of good formative assessment is to enhance learning. I believe that. And Patricia speaks about formative assessment, which she describes as assessment for learning, it's not only about improving marks, it's fun, it's playful, it's about risk taking, it's about authentic assessment, it's about collaboration and it's not one-off. I want to now
39:43
embrace the chapter that follows to talk about some of these things and I'm going to look at the chapter on the digital revolution. I'm going to use the wonderful questions that frame the chapter and begin to answer them in our .. February 2021 context. Her first question is how can technology-enhanced assessment move beyond the patchy, instrumental change we see. My answer to her is a global pandemic is useful, but I think it takes,
40:19
it takes more than a global pandemic to move us. I think the school sector has been quite patchy in implementing digital teaching and assessment, we've seen and read about that , and what Patricia might celebrate as the abandonment of exams by the school sector I would argue might have been a dereliction of duty, that actually we didn't look at the outcomes for students in a systematic way. And I'm not saying that, you know, exams are
40:52
perfect, but I think the higher education sector has been more agile about shifting our teaching and assessment. While that's not all glory days in higher education, I think some of what we've seen, and we've seen it in some of Britain's most august universities, has been a replication of traditional assessment methods on digital platforms and I think we've got a better opportunity than that, I think the disruption presents us with something that is more
41:20
exciting. And that's Patricia's second question, and I've bundled your questions here Patricia, in the article, in the chapter, you talk about what do digital technologies offer and how is knowledge and performance different when represented digitally? I think what we found at Bristol and in translating into online assessment and teaching I think we found much more opportunity for slow pedagogies, for writing, for students writing through the term
41:55
often, rather than for two summative assessments, I think discussion boards, the visual representation of their thinking and the kind of embedded formative, what you would call formative assessment, or formative writing by stealth, has happened with peer feedback, self-evaluation, discussion conversation. I think, strangely, there's been a more personalized education with more more conversation happening when we've taken our virtual learning environments and removed the
42:29
possibility of them simply being repositories for stuff and made them more interactive. So I've loved the fact that I've seen students writing more and we know from the literature on writing that when you write you think, and I think our students are thinking more and they're thinking critically more because they're writing in conversation with others, and they're seeing one another write. We've seen at Bristol much more engagement in learning throughout the term.
42:56
In relation to representation and digital possibilities of that, some of the more creative end of assessment in our university has been students doing podcasts, doing blogs and crafting assessments for a real audience, getting some agency, being creative, being autonomous. So I think that's for me the exciting possibility that digital assessment has presented, or digital technologies for assessment. You ask another question Patricia, how do we address the ethical
43:31
and social risks of the digital? Early on in our translation, our transposition of the curriculum into a digital format, and with the knowledge that 26 000 students from all over the world would be on their devices and in different situations with different technology, we crafted a digital equity policy at that moment, thinking about the digital poverty of some of our students, and so we've started, and I know there was a channel 4 documentary this week which I didn't catch, but I
44:04
saw it on twitter, which showed so many of our international students queuing at basics banks for suppers, because they were not aware of the hardship allowances that many universities have, which link to addressing digital poverty. I think for me there there's another angle to this, I think the digital translation and our education on digital platforms really is a call to greater social justice in education. We can't have education where some people have nothing
44:38
and others have some of the digital tools. I think there's another aspect to the ethical and social risks which you touch on in the chapter, which is the erosion of privacy and surveillance.
44:50
And we see it in higher education as the cameras on/cameras off debate, in part, and I note tonight most people have got their cameras off, and there's something about the invasion of privacy and how we handle the tension between building pedagogic relationships with students, building presence online, and privacy, there's attention there. And I think we've spotted it and we're working on it but I don't think we have an answer. Some of our digital team will say you can build
45:22
presence without having your camera on, you can build it in the chat, you can build it with tools,
45:28
but I think what it's a call to is thinking about how we turn around learning analytics and surveillance to be tools where students have more agency, where they have more autonomy, where it's not about us and them, it's about students actually owning some of that, you know, some of that power. And your final question is, where is the cutting edge, in your chapter on the digital revolution.
46:02
Well I would say the cutting edge is where we are now in every school, every university and you know being the PVC Education at Bristol I'd say It's at Bristol, but other people may argue here, but I think the cutting edge isn't where we just replicate what we were doing before on a digital platform, where we put last year's replay lectures up, the cutting edge is where we translate and transpose our teaching to be interactive, engaging to touch on
46:35
the emotional side of education and to draw out a strong relationship with our students that's not only about students' relationship to knowledge but it's their relationship to us as their teachers, to one another as peers, and their relationship with themselves, so that they grow as agents on this incredible learning journey that many of our students are on at the moment. So I'll finish there.
47:03
I was going to read you a poem, Ii don't know if I'm out of time, I'm probably out of time, so I'll stop. Do you want a poem? It's a poem about assessment, go on, I wanted to read this in tribute to to academics but also in tribute to anyone who marks, and as a tribute to what Patricia calls us to in the book and she uses brilliant quotes from Abbott, that actually we need, we are
47:31
in dangerous territory if we don't recognize the emotional dimensions of education. And here's some emotional dimensions of an academic. It's called Weekend Plans and it's from, if you haven't got it, it's a wonderful book by Kathleen Quinlan, who was at Oxford, Joanne, on how higher education feels.
47:50
This is a poem by David Holper, Weekend Plans. In a talk I recently heard, the speaker said that at 50, a man has less than 1500 weekends left in his life. Having chewed on this fact for the last week, I now realize that my 1499th weekend is coming. And so I'm making big plans: on this 1499th remaining saturday I plan to grade a stack of student papers. But knowing that there are only so many
48:24
of these Saturdays to sit through, I am planning on writing the most remarkable comments and grades I have ever composed. Instead of pointing out where the prose clunks, I will say that the sentence over which I stumble reminds me of a 1962 Fiat convertible I once owned, a car that ran well enough when I bought it, until I rear-ended a truck one day and the front end crumbled pushing the radiator back just enough that the fan chewed a hole through the back end,
48:55
the blades not only making an unearthly racket, but also bleeding the radiator dry and leaving a green stain on the pavement. And instead of pointing out that a comma is not a coma, and no one and a lot are two words, that a manor is a large country house (in a manner of speaking) and that collage is not an institution of higher learning, I will point out to them that Shakespeare, too,
49:22
invented new spellings and words so that rather than see their grades as a kind of condemnation, they might rather embrace these marks as a sort of celebration of their wild and anarchic spirit which has emancipated itself from all bounds, from all pedestrian, prosaic concerns on this glorious remaining 1499th Saturday. There we go. Thank you and thank you for the privilege Patricia
49:54
Wow, what a wonderful poem. And these presentations.
50:04
I think it is truly a rare opportunity for us to be able to listen to the wisdom of the visionaries, and I want to say veterans, of educational assessment that this country has got, to ask them to talk about education assessment in one zoom room. And I believe that, you know, we can ask them to talk about it for hours and with participants from around the world attending this seminar, I know, I've received some private messages from people in China. Actually, it's now
50:40
nearly, the time is now three o'clock or two o'clock. So in the launch Trisha introduced the book and briefly outlined the content and purpose of the selected works of her over 40 years of research and the leadership in education assessment from both sociology and policy perspectives and Joanne talked about the role of assessment in society, its key functions and inherent tensions, in particular the rationality of assessment, assessment as dominatio,n legitimization and so on,
51:16
and Stephen focused on the comparative policy section of the book, mainly looking at the key trends and how assessment has become an increasingly pervasive part of society, the idea of assessment society, assessment as a modernist device which I really enjoyed that. And Tansy focused on assessment for learning, formative assessment personalized assessment, digital assessment and issues and ethics in digital assessment, in this so-called digital revolution.
51:51
The emotional dimension of assessment or grading or scoring of an academic working at a weekend is truly enlightening and enjoyable, so thank you all to the presenters and to all of you participating. I think now the floor is open to everyone to ask questions you can raise hand your digital hand or you can put your questions into the chat box to everyone or just to the the co-host. There's two hands raised Guoxing. Two hands raised actually I can't see them
52:40
Okay, Harvey is the one i see on the top. You can turn on your microphone apparently that's needed and also your camera
52:59
Harvey? Sorry I hit raise hand by accident. Just to say how much i've enjoyed the talks.
53:23
Thank you, thank you very much and Roger and Elizabeth Murphy
53:33
Thank you, it's actually Roger Murphy who's asking the the question or making the point. Trisha, thank you very much for, you know, for the book and for your work. I think our paths have crossed over many many years, I think it's about 43 at the last count, but you've made such a distinctive contribution to the field of educational assessment and that's been great and I think the respondents tonight have really done justice to that and
54:00
and brought that out so I think one thing I'd like to ask you to comment on a bit further I suppose, is the future of the sociology of assessment, what you know you've written your book, you're coming, you've drawn together a lot of your work what if there was a young sociologist of assessment and of course I'm not that, but if it was one what would you see as the kind of big areas to develop in the
54:27
in the coming decades? Wow, what a question Roger, I didn't anticipate that at all I think our discussants tonight actually have laid out the territory for an answer very well I think what Tansy was saying in her talk about the really positive developments in pedagogy and assessment which have been brought about
55:02
not least by the pandemic but was already there as a trend in expert thinking in assessment , I think that offers us a really bright vision of not only a transformation in assessment but also transformation in teaching and learning more generally, to come to understand it differently and that isn't a sociology of assessment and for that I probably, my post script about the impact of covid does try to be sociological in the sense that I am trying to understand
55:42
how the constants and context which I referred to at the beginning, and these four systems of of competence and competition and content and control, how they will have been affected by
56:00
the changing methodologies for assessment that we've now got, so, as Stephen was saying the current technologies that we use for assessment are extraordinarily old-fashioned I mean I cannot believe that in this day and age we're still writing exams on pieces of paper with pens, you know the chinese were doing that 3000 years ago and so, sociologically, it seems to me that the functions that assessment plays in society are changing in the way that Stephen was
56:41
hinting at in all sorts of different guises because the nature of society is changing, the way we do production is changing, so I'd hope a young scholar would pursue some of those
56:56
new conceptions of the interrelationship between what is going on in society and what therefore will go on in assessment as a means of control, because that's basically what he was talking about, control, and I think another young scholar ought to be pursuing what Tansy was highlighting which is the positives and the negatives, potentially, around the transformation that's coming in methodologies of assessment using technology,
57:29
and I think another, a third young scholar if you like, should tackle what sociologists have always tackled, that Joanne raised, which is the way in which assessment reinforces existing inequalities, meant to be and always, it's always seemed to me a terrible dilemma between
57:50
the use of, the invention of assessment which was meant to bring in, as we said meritocracy and greater social justice, and what was lovely, beautifully called 'the capacity catching machine' and what's it actually done, which is reinforced privilege. That one is not new, but it certainly needs further pursuit. So there's three different avenues all of which I think have deeply fruitful potential. Thank you very much, and next, Caroline please
58:31
Hello Trisha, it's Caroline Gipps here. Hello Caroline. It's very nice to see, I was going to say, the old gang, and thank you very much for writing a book in order to get us together again I've been reflecting on the issue of school assessment, school exams, and the developments in the assessment that you quite rightly have become very interested in and I did myself for a while when I was still working in the field but, I think that developments
59:04
in technology, online assessment and moving towards an online examination system has been dealt, in my view, a massive body blow over Covid and what's charmingly called homeschooling.
59:22
And I'm wondering whether we're thinking about digital assessment being based within school. or whether we're seeing it as lumped, somehow connected with studying at home and moving to exams at home. And indeed last summer I was on a committee of Ofqual along with Joanne and Gordon and a couple of other people, and the chair at one point said, and we were talking about how to manage GCSE and not having GCSE and A-levels, how to get grades for students for the end
59:59
of the year, and the chair said, if only we could do online exams, all our problems would be solved. Well, of course, what we know now is that it's not just digital poverty that is embedding social discrepancies in schooling, the connectivity is almost a bigger issue, so just feeling that we can move all this online links in, I think, now we have come to realize, with what is available for students at home. So just one very basic and boring, but absolutely relevant example
1:00:47
broadband is patchy, but you can't get a broadband contract unless you have a settled address, a bank account and a credit rating, now how many families do you think with two or three children at home, home working do not have the ability to get a broadband contract like that, so they're having to do pay as you go and so on so I believe assessment, we have to believe assessment is redeemable, I do believe that using more digital
1:01:19
techniques is the way to go, but I would just say that paper and pen is much more, paper and pencil is much more easily and cheaply available to every member of society. Anyway, bit of a ramble but it does link in with some of the pointers that you've made in your book.
1:01:40
Well I'll just say a couple of things, Caroline if i may, but I think Tansy might want to come in on that. I shall never forget, I don't think, Stephen what you said about all assessment is dangerous, not all assessment is bad but all assessment is dangerous, I don't know who that quote comes from
1:02:05
It's a version of a quote from Michel Foucault. Oh it's Foucault, yes, okay. Not everything is bad, but everything is dangerous. So it's a Stephen Ball special. And I think, Caroline, you're evoking that point, that I think this is another topic for a future sociologist really that whether this surveillance, this power to oversee people comprehensively, that some people worry about with profiling and portfolios and all that kind of thing maybe
1:02:44
that will become even more pervasive as it comes into your digital learning space at home, but I think you were evoking the social inequality of it as well as the potential surveillance dangers, so I'll leave it to other discussants too, if any of the others want to join in on that
1:03:10
I wouldn't mind coming in on that Patricia, I think
1:03:15
when we talk about digital poverty I think we're talking about hardware and we're talking about connectivity and I think Caroline's absolutely right in terms of parents who don't have an address, a credit rating, not being able to get broadband, but I think this is the real call to social justice, I think part of what we should be lobbying for is broadband to be a pervasive right rather than a privatized good because I think if we get more digital assessment
1:03:52
and we have to have online exams if the pandemic rumbles on in different forms we will just widen inequality if we don't address this issue, so for me there's a real call to action around connectivity, which you're right, it's a worse problem for higher education students, you know when we do pulse surveys hardware is much less of an issue than connectivity and some of it is, you know just living in a rural area but a lot of it is related to
1:04:23
not having decent broadband and in the context of universities, it's houses of multiple occupancy with eight people trying to stream lectures, it's not plausible. So I think there's work to be done on that to make it work. I think my perception from the university side is the fact that A levels and GCSE's, particularly A levels didn't take place kind of kicked the can down the road for universities in terms of who we accepted and how we had to work with students
1:04:57
whose capability we didn't really know, so I think that for me was the issue and it would have, I know there were teacher assessed grades but I kind of, it was quite hard to understand what they meant. Yes, thank you. Trisha can I engage. Yeah yeah go ahead. I too was struck by Stephen's assertion that all assessment is dangerous and I'd like to speak for the rational, and this is a theme that you have in the book, obviously,
1:05:33
where you talk about the switch to rational rather than values and this scientification of education and assessment, and this playing a big part in meritocracy.
1:05:48
And I guess there is something in that, that's important as a society
1:05:55
I care, actually that doctors have learned some of that material in the curriculum, it's not just a cultural and value, there's actually a practical point to it and so for those reasons I think that the rationality of assessment is not going to go away and is actually culturally important to us, but the other thing that struck me when Stephen was talking is, I can see the dangers of assessment, of course, and we know about the biases and so on,
1:06:29
but what's the alternative? What are the dangers around that? And I think that's the sort of territory we end up in when we look at not having exams, what's the logic behind them and the different assessment systems that are set out, or when we move into a more surveillance kind of way of assessing people, and I'm really struck by what Tansy was saying because that access to the internet really should be a human right these days there are so many reasons
1:07:00
that we need it just to function as an individual in society. So going back to assessment, I think it's dangerous and it's necessary, that's the problem I think we have. Agreed. Can I, am I allowed to disagree? Or perhaps you should ask other people to ask that question. Olease do. But I
1:07:24
I don't see why assessment is necessary. We only think that way because we have a very fixed, immutable epistemic conception of what education is, and that's based on the three message systems curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and we can only think education in those terms. We think about it in terms of schools or universities which are constructed around curriculum assessment and pedagogy and if any of those go wrong then we look for alternatives, but
1:08:00
they're always an alternative form of assessment and alternative curriculum and alternative pedagogy. What I think we need to do, if we're going to be properly radical in our thinking, is actually eradicate those things from our thinking and create a space in which we can think differently about what education might be without those tools. Why do we have to start with those? They're only there because they were constructed for the purposes of managing a population in the
1:08:31
19th century that was moving from the countryside to the city and caused social problems. That's why we have schools. They're not there to make people more .. better educated, that that may be a side effect for some, but for the whole it's a technique of management, it's a technique of division, a technique of biopolitics. But we're mesmerized by the idea of this, of the school, and these three architectural bases for the school and I think we do, if
1:09:07
we're going to be, if we're going to be proper educationalists we have to think without them.
1:09:14
I'd like to challenge that from outside the field,
1:09:18
not being a sociologist, so coming from the field of of psychology, my challenge is this, that these judgments and assessments are going on all the while and we actually, we see it in Foucault's work, he talks to us a lot, doesn't he, and so the question is yes we can set aside
1:09:39
these formal assessments that we know well and we can study their functions in terms of control and so on but those assessments will be going on in any case, it's part of human nature, it's part of the way that we as social animals sort out status in society and unequally distribute things, so I don't think assessment is going away anytime soon, and so I'm actually saying I think, an even more radical thought is needed about how we would construct
1:10:12
an education system without assessment in any shape or form, and I don't believe that's going to be credible in human society. Wow. Now we'll have to talk about human nature,
1:10:28
and whether or not we can use that as a way of explaining things. Anyway.
1:10:36
Sorry Quoxing, over to you. Okay thank you, yeah and we've got one two three more hands up so next one, Sandra Acker? Yes, video on, hi everybody, thanks for the the talks nice to see you and some of the audience as well they're only there is names though, I've had two points, I mostly work on issues to do with higher education and in particular academic work where all kinds of questions can be raised about assessment performance
1:11:16
management and so forth. Today i just read an article in the Times Higher about University of Liverpool attempting to make, within one of its faculties, attempting to make redundant people that didn't have enough grant income or high enough impact scores, and that sounds pretty threatening. My other point though, has to do with the silver lining that Covid is said to be bringing, and I am reading that over and over again in one form or another and I think it's kind of wishful
1:11:53
thinking, although probably there will be, you know, improvements in a number of areas, but to me it's, I mean there are a lot of surveys and other things that have been published on academic work with that ending at least, about a silver lining , and to me it's, you know, at the moment anyway, Covid means an illness and some of those side effects like being locked down and having your
1:12:19
grandchild miss months and months of school, trying to work, an eight-year-old on a computer all day with his mother having to step in and so forth, lots of very negative consequences and it's, I'm wondering why we we are so pushed to present it as having a silver lining. I think I'm more with Stephen in terms of seeing dangers of many many things in the world.
1:12:49
In view of time, Guoxing, would it be worth gathering up a couple of questions and responding? Yes excellent idea, so Sandra's question aout Covid-19. Great to see you Sandy. Yeah hi Trish. Hi, colleagues long long ago at Bristol. Okay next one, Rose? Yeah, hi Patricia, great to see you. Hello Rose. Hi delighted to be here, thank you, you know, for all your, sort of, written prose over the years and your personal advice and
1:13:26
expertise in our fields. Just going back to the use of technology though, I just want to make the point I think that you know, yes you know, we know there are, and it has been exposed, the whole idea of connectivity and the social issues to do connectivity but I would still sort of raise the the point really that the use of technology and the way that, obviously, actually the use of technology has been fast forwarded in many areas
1:13:51
over the last year, starts to re-establish the question of not how we assess, but what we assess, and I think that's the opportunity really, you know, there, we all know, particularly in schools there is a real disconnect between the way that people, that the students learn their interactions with their technology in their everyday life and then the way that they have to step back into, sort of, writing essays once or twice a year, you
1:14:16
know, I think we have a marvelous opportunity to make some connections between those two aspects and actually then consider about, you know, more authentic ways of assessing skills and values and competencies for students going forward. Thank you, thank you and Jannette?
1:14:37
Hi everybody, hello it's really. Hello Jannette. Live from Belfast. I'm just saying how fantastic it would be to be in a room with you all and to see you all. That would be a real treat, however it's been really fantastic to listen to everybody and to hear the questions. I suppose my
1:14:57
question to you Trish is maybe around theory and what theories can help us? I think we've had the stranglehold of psychometrics on assessment and that's why everybody rushes to say we must change it, it doesn't suit, it's, and I was interested in
1:15:17
the thought there, that you know higher education, and I agree, and it's part of my frustrations in my present role is that this cognitive psychology dimension to the thinking around assessment. And you've gone to sociology and the theories of sociology to help you understand that, so I was just wondering if you thought that there there might be other theories to help us and, as you know, I'm interested in sociocultural theory, so
1:15:48
assessments as sort of artifacts, and maybe going back to what Stephen said, if you're, maybe we need to redefine what pedagogy, curriculum, assessment are, that's really what we should be about
1:16:05
I think there's, yes, so it's really about the theories that help us try and understand what assessment is and how that can be redefined and rethought about
1:16:18
in a different context, in a post-covid world if you like, so thank you.
1:16:25
Shall we try, between us to try and answer those last three questions, because it seems to me that they very neatly, the three questions, bring together some of the tensions that are very apparent in this whole seminar of strengths and weaknesses, or dangers and positives of assessment. Jannette, if I was to try and give you a top of the my head answer to your question, but others may have different answers,
1:16:57
actually what I really care about, in a practical sort of sense is recognizing that learning takes so many different forms, and why people learn and why they're motivated to learn is fundamentally important, and again to pick up another anecdote following Joanne's example, when I used to give lectures to random groups of people, teachers and so on, I used to always, or very often, start by asking them to remember an assessment episode that they'd experienced, like
1:17:41
whatever, very often, they remember school exams or even a driving test or something like that and always it was a a hugely emotional experience and I think the thing that bothers me is the way, as Joanne was saying, you know this rationalism, that we're just doing a sort of measurement job here, but every time you measure somebody you actually impact hugely on
1:18:09
on how they feel about themselves, about learning and so on, and so I'm not sure what theory Jannette, that would come under, but I think the frame of reference needs to change from and that picks up, sort of Rose's point that we have increasingly got the technologies to do, to assess different things, to focus not so much on what the tools are that we use for assessment, but what the, to understand what we're doing when we assess people. I mean that's in the
1:18:44
sort of 'assessment for learning' stable, not the macro stable that we were talking about earlier, but whatever we do, unfortunately, in one-to-one interactions or sort of micro-interactions is within the context of the kind of surveillance that Sandra was talking about, in the dangers that we've also highlighted in the seminar, so it leaves me very torn really as to what is the best way forward. I don't know if anybody else or other speakers can give a better answer than that?
1:19:24
I would only add that in a way, the way the questions are formed, Ithink for me, it'll illustrate that the argument I was trying to make this kind of ravenousness of assessment and and we've got to the situation where something is only worthwhile if we can assess it and if we can't assess it then it, then it's not worthwhile and what we neglect in that is what assessment does to what it is that we assess. Yes. And whether we leave it untouched by assessment
1:19:59
So I would go back, Rose said it's not a matter of how we assess but what and, but I would say it's not a matter of how we assess and what we assess, it's why we assess, why are we assessing these things, why is this drive to assess everything and constantly expand the boundaries and the subjects and objects of that which is assessed and is assessable? I think that is where the danger lies. Anybody else want to comment on that one?
1:20:38
I just wanted to, oh Caroline, you're coming in. I did put my hand up but it didn't quite work. It did work. Oh good. The thing we have to also engage with is what the general public thinks school is for. I mean, I absolutely take Stephen's point, we're framing all these questions within what we understand by schooling now. We have to also engage with what the public thinks schooling is for and what they expect to be as outcomes of it when their children
1:21:18
are concerned, and I think the chances of doing anything particularly revolutionary are so slight that we probably need to have a much more grounded debate. I mean last summer when there were no exams, the average person on the street, the average parent just assumed that teachers would look into their mark books and look at the marks they had for that student for that course and produce a grade. They could not understand that there were more issues than that
1:21:55
involved, so I just think that, I think everything we've talked about this evening absolutely needs talking about but there is this huge gap between what we are talking about and thinking about and what the general public understand and are thinking about and I think, for, you know, the aspiring young sociologist or educational psychologist that's an area that I really would like to see the next generation getting to grips with, how we can have a conversation
1:22:29
outside our theoretical areas that can move public opinion forward.
1:22:43
I think there's scope for another book really, there's been incredibly large range of topics tonight. I don't know, Guoxing, if you're moving towards winding things up? But I was just going to make a synoptic statement and I maybe .. properly .. sociological term, maybe our speakers would like to make one brief synoptic statement too but I just think this conversation tonight has illustrated what an enormous
1:23:22
tapestry assessment is and there are no, there's so many questions and so few answers, but
1:23:33
I would like to think that we have between us, and with our lovely questions, we have demonstrated quite incontrovertibly that a sociology of assessment matters and so I'm very happy with that but that's my last word. But maybe the others would like to have a last word too.
1:23:55
Can we take the order, from yes, next one, Joanne? Yes I think that's been a really fascinating conversation, I'm privileged to take part. Thanks ever so much for bringing us together like this Trisha. I think if I was to answer the question about where should we be going from here, we do well formulated theory, I know that's contested in the literature, about psychometrics, but we actually don't have well formulated theory about other ways of thinking about assessment
1:24:29
and I think that's the map that we need for the next phase at least, and I think we need it before the surveillance society really captures formal educational assessment properly.
1:24:47
Stephen? I would just, I would just say thank you to Trisha for the opportunity to disagree, that there aren't enough opportunities to disagree these days and the more of them the better and I enjoyed this one and I enjoyed the book as well, thank you. And thank you for the preface, Stephen, as well, which we need to acknowledge and celebrate. My pleasure. Thank you. Tansy? Yes, I just would echo the
1:25:21
thanks for a fantastic evening and I suppose my thinking about some of the things we've raised is perhaps we need to think both/and, so both the rational and the emotional and intuitive, both a bit of assessment and loads of formative, rather than saying neither, and just thinking of Sandra's comment which, you know, there is no silver lining, or is there a silver lining, I think it's
1:25:55
both, and I think it's tragic, it's grim, it's hard and I think it's accelerated our understanding of learning design and teaching and assessment like nothing else, so for me it's both/and. Thank you.
1:26:12
Thank you very much to all the speakers and we have Sarah Hyde from Routledge to formally launch the book but I'm expecting there's another book coming up from Patricia.
1:26:28
So welcome Sarah. Thank you. Hello everyone, my name is Sarah Hyde and I'm the commissioning editor at Routledge. I firstly wanted to say how fantastic it is to see so many people at this event. One of the real pros of being able to do these events online is being able to reach so many people so it's really great to see everyone.
1:26:47
I originally met Patricia in May 2018 at a Boston Tea Party in Bristol whilst I was on a campus calling trip and we met to discuss the idea of her becoming part of the Routledge prestigious World Library of Education series, for those of you who aren't familiar with the series, it allows international experts real long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces so that the world can read them in a single manageable volume and readers can
1:27:14
understand how the author's ideas and practices developed to shape a particular field of study.
1:27:20
I'm so pleased to be here today and say that we've now published the greatest hits of Patricia Broadfoot entitled 'The sociology of assessment: comparative and policy perspectives' . In a work that spans almost four decades Patricia applies her trademark sociological and comparative perspectives to empirical studies at every level of the educational system, from her classic long-term study of the impact of changing national assessment policies from pupils and
1:27:47
teachers in the classrooms of England and France, to her sustained championship of the need for a better understanding of the impact of assessment on learning, Patricia has consistently championed the need for a more developed sociological understanding of assessment, and her accessible writing offers insights that are as novel as they are important for the education of future generations. It's been an absolute pleasure to work with patricia and see this project develop and
1:28:12
bloom. I'm honoured to have had the opportunity to publish it. This book is available for purchase now and if you use the code FLR40 at checkout you can receive 20% off and there are currently discounts on the routers website at the moment so the ebook is available for less than 30 pounds. And
1:28:35
finally just to say that we can't underestimate the time and dedication that goes into writing a book, so congratulations again to Patricia on the publication of this fantastic work.
1:28:49
Thank you Sarah and thank you for all your support. Yes, I think in normal times we would have champagne opened but in the zoom room let's all wave hand and say thank you to Patricia for this wonderful opportunity to actually reflect on 40 years worth of research and it's the best selected works. Thank you very much. All the faces are coming live now.
1:29:23
Were people not allowed to be seen before Christie?
1:29:31
i just changed the view to gallery view so people can see everyone
1:29:37
I wasn't sure if it would work for everybody. It's very clever there they are. Yes look at that, they were there all the time and we didn't know it.
1:29:50
Great to see everyone. Yes we'll raise a virtual glass, absolutely, bye Trisha. Bye-bye
1:30:00
Bye everyone. Congratulations. Congratulations Trisha, fantastic event. Oh good to see you Sue and thank you for your contribution, so many people here I've worked with.
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