Week 8 Discussion

Week 8 Discussion

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Week 8 Discussion

The education system should support local-level efforts that strive to ensure there is quality learning in addition to reliable teacher assessment. These efforts help in the building of a sustainable assessment culture. Instructors are the ideal parties for monitoring the learning of students and provide evidence-based judgments in their achievement. Nevertheless, standards should not be used merely for government reporting especially if they are not used in the design and implementation of the classroom assessment for monitoring the performance of students. Despite the fact that standard-based frameworks are not sufficient, they provide instructors with a dependable means of assessing students. The development of sustainable assessment cultures requires the creation of examples of well-designed assessment tasks, moderation practices that incorporate quality assurance checks, and continuous support to teachers through facilitating their professional development. Teachers should be provided with enough time for professional development. There should also be appropriate policies to facilitate the building of sustainable assessment cultures (Colbert, Wyatt-Smith, & Klenowski, 2012).

The introduction of principles for effective assessment and the development of relevant resources, which include assessment tools for determining good assessment practice and design, availability of materials for illustrating how teachers can develop assessment tasks that align with the curriculum demands, would go a long way towards ensuring there is coherence between the system – instructors and assessment – and the site – the location where the assessment occurs. There should be policy to ensure instructors have the necessary capabilities to facilitate the implementation and development of the needs of the curriculum. This implies that there should be intelligent accountability. Intelligent accountability requires more attention to be given to good governance instead of focusing on control (Klenowski & Wyatt-Smith, 2013). Therefore, learning institutions should be provided with some level of self-governance to ensure there is coherence between the system and the site.

References

Colbert, P., Wyatt-Smith, C., & Klenowski, V. (2012). A systems-level approach to building sustainable assessment cultures: Moderation, quality task design and dependability of judgement. Policy Futures in Education, 10(4), 386-401.

Klenowski, V., & Wyatt-Smith, C. (2013). Assessment for education: Standards, judgement and moderation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.