Volume 7, Number 3 (December 2008): Focus: English/literacy as (re)constructed by assessment practice

Co-editors: David Whitehead (School of Education, University of Waikato) and Yvonne Reed (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)

Rationale:

There is growing international concern around the impact of local, national and international assessment protocols on English/literacy as a construct and English/literacy teaching within schools and tertiary institutions; a broad concern that might be characterised as the tail (assessment protocols) wagging the dog (teaching and learning). This concern stems, for example, from knee-jerk reactions to PIRLS and other international assessments that measure slithers of literacy and that devalue through exclusion multimodal demonstrations of learning from the language/literacy curriculum.

Another aspect of this concern is the value placed on the use of empirical assessments as means of accountability; a position that values quantitative and summative assessments over qualitative and formative assessments. Another issue relates to the impact of assessment on innovative teachers who want to test as they teach, an issue of ecological validity. Yet another is the impact of highly specified examination syllabi that, especially in countries with less highly specified curriculum, become the curriculum by default. An associated concern is the potential for such highly specified examination syllabi to remove teachers' attention from the needs of diverse student populations. A further concern centres on the extent to which  teachers use assessment data to inform their practice, select texts, write curriculum prescriptions and allocate resources.

In this issue, a range of researchers, teacher educators and teachers from a variety of educational settings consider the reconstructive impact of assessment on English/literacy and practice.

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