VET
Assessment on demand
New Zealand is about to move towards a flexible, student-centred approach to assessment. By Stuart Middleton
when the announcement was made that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority was going to assess qualifications by delivering the assessments to anyone, anywhere, anytime, online and on-demand, there was a feeling that while this might not have a small step for mankind, it was certainly a giant leap for educators.
The story really started back in 1990, when the then-minister of education initiated a review of qualifications in New Zealand, and one of the promises was that“ time served would be dead”.
In other words, there would be flexibility in the pathways along which students could travel towards better futures. The lock step assessments completed on the same day by a cohort would be gone. Students would be able to move at their own speed and that would be faster for some and more methodical for others.
Finally, twenty years later, the small shot has been fired and perhaps we are about to see some of the movement towards that flexible and student-centred approach to assessment promised so long ago.
It is not what changes do to education institutions but rather what education institutions do to those changes. New ways are found of socialising them into the old ways of working. New approaches end up as the old approaches, but described with new words.
Thomas Kuhn wrote of the difficulty of avoiding this as he described the nature of a paradigm shift for that is what the proposed changes to the qualifications system in reality was. First, a system has to move away from the old system. Back then, it was the move to competency-based assessment that was announced and“ unit standards” as the basis for generating credit outlined.
Secondly, there is a period of uncertainty in which the final shape of the changes is not yet clear or fixed. This is an unsettling period. In an ideal educational world, that uncertainty is followed by a period when the changes crystallise to a point where the stage emerges – the new world flourishes, and we celebrate the improvements that are apparent.
38 | May 2013
If TS Eliot is right to say that human kind cannot bear very much reality, then I say that educators cannot bear very much uncertainty.
Of course, the two are related, to accept the uncertainty of a paradigm shift you have first to accept that the change is necessary – in other words, accept the reality. In that case, the reality was that in the school system the examination system was spitting out half the students each year as failures, when demonstrably those students often knew quite a lot and had many skills. Tertiary assessment in courses was still typically end-of-course activity of one kind or another.
As a result, the education system started to turn the new system into one that fitted the paradigm of the old. Merely demonstrating competence would not do –“ achieved” was not enough and“ merit” and“ excellence” were introduced. Then the basis of assessment, the unit standards, was developed as quasicurriculum so that they could be taught as courses called NCEA Level 1, NCEA Level 2 and NCEA Level 3. This fitted neatly into the framework of Year 11, Year 12, and Year 13 replacing the various examinations at each level.
In tertiary programs, assessment was not close to becoming continuous and accumulative, but instead remained a series of events. What was never understood was that it was the old normreferenced external assessment lock-stepby-year, lock-step-by-level paradigm that was being replaced.
Addressing a conference in New Zealand, qualifications authority Dr Karen Poutasi was making a significant statement.“ NZQA intends to change the current paradigm,” she said“ and to discuss with you some of the thinking we have done around digital assessment …”
This was described at length in the speech but in a later radio news report, Poutasi described it crisply, saying that she“ expects that NZQA would deliver assessments to anyone, anywhere, anytime, online and on-demand.”
This is the first move in fulfilling the early promise of the reforms that“ time served would be dead”.
If the assessment is freed from the constraints of time, form and place, then the structures which currently restrain any move away from the old paradigm might no longer apply. Nor need the requirement that students move in room-sized groups through qualifications in a shared linear fashion necessarily continue to be imperative.
I am glad that Karen Poutasi used the word“ paradigm”. The changes started twenty years ago are certainly of that order and might now even be achieved.
I can already hear the mumbles about issues that will be raised by the web-based assessment proposal but they will be nothing that cannot be solved.
The danger will be that educators who wish change to exploit the opportunities in the interests of their students will be reined in by the command structures of institutions and of the wider system. n