Coproduction of Assessment Practices: Challenges Emerging in Teachers’ Collaborative Work With “Assessment for Learning”

• In Event: Coproduction Practices: Reconfiguring Professional Knowledge and Work

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper focuses on the professional challenges teachers face when presented with new requirements for student assessment, which imply increased collaboration among teachers as well as with students and parents. In recent years, the concept of ‘Assessment for Learning’ (AfL) has traveled across countries, giving rise to educational policy initiatives and school development projects. Research has shown that the development of joint assessment practices is a complex undertaking, which requires extensive collaborative work (Harrison 2005). Further, developing AfL implies changes in the division of labor between teachers and students (Webb and Jones 2009). Few studies have, however, studied AfL projects from the perspective of co-production in professional work.

Perspectives/theoretical framework
This paper employs a socio-cultural perspective of collaborative and artifact-mediated practice (Engeström 2007, Wertsch 1993) to investigate how teachers must resolve a range of professional questions and challenges when ‘unpacking’ expectations to involve colleagues, students, and parents in collaborative efforts to support student learning.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The data derive from an ethnographic study of teachers’ collaborative work in three secondary schools in Norway, who were developing shared formative assessment practices through their participation in an AfL project initiated by the local educational authorities. We focus on the work of an AfL project group charged with supporting the institutionalization of formative assessment practices at their school, consisting of teachers from different levels and subjects.

Data sources, evidence, objects or materials
Data consist of video-taped observations of seven group discussions, field notes, and one group interview. The data is analyzed from a collaborative practice perspective, focusing on how professional challenges emerge in the social interaction as the group strives to ‘unpack’ the different requirements and meaning potentials of AfL, and how they endeavor to constitute tools for joint assessment practices.


Results and/or substantiated conclusions
The analysis shows that the AfL project generated a number of professional challenges for the teachers to engage in, and that extensive groundwork was needed to prepare for joint assessment practices. This work included developing a shared understanding of the students’ role in the educational process, and of the formal responsibilities placed on teachers by current legislation.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study
The study shows that extensive local curriculum work needed to be performed as a basis for involving students and parents in AfL activities. Hence, a prime outcome of the co-productive collaborative work concerned curriculum development rather than AfL as such. We discuss how responsibilities for co-production of assessment practices still rest with the teacher and propose that this expanded responsibility call for new support structures on the institutional level.

Authors

• Monika Nerland, University of Oslo

• Hege Yvonne Hermanson, University of Oslo