Uppeldi og menntun - 01.01.2011, Page 120

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 20 (1) 2011120
námSmat Í náttúrUfræÐi
Assessment in science education
What do school curricula emphasise?
abstraCt
This article reports on the findings of a research project investigating assessment of
learning as delineated in Icelandic school curricula for compulsory education. A system-
atic probability sample of 58 primary and lower-secondary schools was obtained from
a list of all compulsory schools in Iceland; every third school was chosen. Each school’s
policy, goals, methods, items (what was assessed) and the results of assessment were
inspected, as introduced in each school curriculum guide, with the aim of answering
the following questions: What was the alleged purpose of assessment? Was there a
special policy or rationale introduced with respect to assessment? What was assessed?
What methods were most prominent? What was the nature of the assessment? What
did the curriculum guides say about tests and testing, compared to other assessment
methods? What was said about the use of assessment results?
The article reports on the findings about assessment in natural science in grades 3,
6 and 9. According to the results, schools seem to emphasise assessment of students’
effort, elaboration, workbooks, homework, activities, independence, attitudes and
motivation rather than knowledge and understanding of subject matter. Nevertheless,
tests and quizzes seem to be commonly used assessment methods along with a vaguely
defined ongoing assessment or continuous assessment. Some results in this study
conform to other research findings (McMillan, 2001; McMillan, Myran and Work-
man, 2002) concerning discrepancy. In some curriculum guides, an inconsistency was
observed between accounts of assessment in chapters relating to school policy, on
the one hand, and chapters pertaining to discrete subjects and grades, on the other.
Besides, classroom teachers seem to use a “hodgepodge” of factors (cf. McMillan et
al., 2002) when assessing and grading students. They appear to use a variety of assess-
ment techniques, although those techniques do not seem to be clearly established with
respect to evaluation or measurement principles. Assessment criteria and learning
outcomes are inexplicit and the use of systems, such as Bloom’s taxonomy of learning
objectives, was not observed.
Discourse and rhetoric among teachers and other educators about learning and
assessment appears to emphasise formative assessment where “teachers and learners
together create their own curriculum realities” (cf. Van den Akker, 2010) focusing
on alternative assessment practices, such as performance-based assessments, port-
folios and authentic assessment, rather than traditional paper-and-pencil assessments.
However, real practice seems to endorse an academic school curriculum to a consider-
able extent, setting standards for students and using tests as a motivation for pupils to
learn the curriculum and teachers to teach it. The results of this study indicate that the
rhetoric found in principal aims and policy texts in the curriculum guides examined
in this study does indeed appear to be shaped by ideologies rooted in pedagogical