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Curriculum and Assessment

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_ The professional responsibilities of assessment cultural bias in standardised testing Teachers assessing themselves? Why assess students' work at all? Assessing students' work STELLA's statements about assessment The language of outcomes Developing a critical perspective on curriculum and policy The' typical learning' progression Page 10 Page 11 _
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curriculum and assessment

cultural bias in standardised testing


Some critics have not only objected to standardised tests and the culturally loaded assumptions behind multiple choice questions, but they have challenged why the traditional academic essay should have some kind of privileged status when it comes to assessing a student’s language abilities.

Here is a range of critiques that users of this site may like to comment on:

  1. In PDF ‘Writing, Testing, Culture’, Michael Clyne shows the culturally loaded nature of essay writing as it understood in Anglophone culture.

  1. Alex Kostogriz, in a more recent chapter, title PDF ‘(Trans)cultural spaces of writing’ (in Writing=Learning, Doecke & Parr, 2005) has critiqued Clyne’s construction of cultural characteristics, while still acknowledging the limiting and destructive ways in which school essay writing has been used to diminish the value of learning by ESL students in schools.

  1. Richard Teese has also observed the privileged status of the literary essay in matriculation examinations in Victoria in the 20th century.. . According to Teese, the traditional emphasis on writing a literary essay advantages students from a certain type of cultural background while disadvantaging others. (See R. Teese, Academic success and social power : examinations and inequality, Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press.)

 

Is writing an essay the only way to show one’s ability as a student of English? No doubt you can think of many other types of writing that pose equally complex demands as the essay.  Yet state-wide examination systems often focus narrowly on essay writing skills, requiring English teachers to teach to the test, and to equip their students with the necessary skills to produce essays under exam conditions. This is at the expense of promoting other activities, such as giving oral presentations, creating multimedia texts, not to mention other forms of language.

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_ The professional responsibilities of assessment cultural bias in standardised testing Teachers assessing themselves? Why assess students' work at all? Assessing students' work STELLA's statements about assessment The language of outcomes Developing a critical perspective on curriculum and policy The' typical learning' progression Page 10 Page 11 _
Page1 _

 

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"Accomplished teachers teach in the expectation that they will learn from their students. They recognise that their students bring a wealth of experience and knowledge into their classrooms which constitutes an invaluable resource for writing. They devise strategies that enable their students to draw on cultural practices outside school, including the rich semiotic resources of popular culture"

STELLA 2004

 

  

STELLA website
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