Intelligent Accountability in Education - Journal Reflection - Reflective Writing - Reflective Journal Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Systems of accountability are second order ways of using evidence of the standard to which first order tasks are carried out for a great variety of purposes. However, more accountability is not always better, and processes of holding to account can impose high costs without securing substantial benefits. At their worst, they may damage performance of the very first order tasks for which they supposedly improve accountability. In education this may happen if the assessment tail starts to wag the education dog. Teachers and learners, like others, need to be held to account, but this requires intelligent systems of accountability that do not distort primary activities. Intelligent accountability in education, as elsewhere, also needs to communicate, not merely to disseminate, relevant evidence that can be assessed by those to whom professionals and institutions are accountable. Keywords: intelligent accountability; trust; judgment; educational assessment Uses of assessment evidence The evidence provided by systems of assessment can be used for many purposes. In schooling its most obvious and primary uses are educational: the results of pupil assessment can be used by pupils, parents and teachers to judge what has been learnt, to take appropriate educational steps, as well as to hold pupils to account for their learning——or lack of learning. However, the same evidence can also be reused to hold teachers and schools to account. Such secondary uses of assessment evidence may seem simple and convenient, but in fact lead to many complexities and difficulties. For present purposes I shall set the primary, educational uses of assessment evidence aside, in order to concentrate on its reuse within the education system to assess a wider range of agents and institutions, and in particular to hold them to account. So I shall say little about the numerous uses of pupil assessments that bear on decisions made by or for individual pupils. My reason for bracketing these uses of educational assessment is not because they are unimportant: information *House of Lords, Westminster, London SW1A 0PW, UK. Email:oon20@cam.ac.uk Oxford Review of Education, 2013 Vol. 39, No. 1, 4–16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2013.764761 2013 Onora O’Neill provided by educational assessment is used by pupils, their parents and others in making significant educational and employment choices. Pupils may be offered or refused coveted opportunities for further study or employment on the basis of assessment evidence of what they have or have not learnt. In itself, a favourable assessment is just that, but once linked to valued opportunities it becomes much more. In itself, an unfavourable assessment is just that: but when it becomes a basis for exclusion from valued education, training, employment or promotion it becomes much more. These familiar further uses of evidence provided by educational assessment are often of great importance, and in many cases life chances are at stake.

Trust in assessment

Perhaps, however, we can be more optimistic about educational assessment and the forms of accountability for which it is reused than we can about other forms of assessment and accountability. After all, each of us has been at school and taken exams, and understands the primary uses of educational assessment. Should not reuses of the same evidence by systems of accountability be easier for most of us to understand than those that are used for holding insurers or bankers or broadcasters to account? So we might hope. However, there are also reasons for being less optimistic. Many of us do not in fact understand how exams are marked, or what those who mark them aim to measure, or why the exams do not offer better evidence for selection for university admission or for employment. Anybody who deals with university admissions will have had heart-breaking correspondence with pupils or their parents, who cannot understand that what they see as amazing performance (all those As!) has not met with success, and who may be unable to imagine any better performance. In such circumstances, some suspect——or insist——that there must have been prejudice or unfair discrimination: since the outcome of the process seems wrong, the process is not trusted.

Write a journal reflection include at minimum:

• One sentence that summarises the key issue in the article

• One sentence that explains why this issue is of importance to the field

• One sentence that explains how this issue is relevant (or not relevant) to you

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