Gaining ground in the assessment battlefield: the advancement of digital badges and micro-credentials in UK

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Capitalizing (on) a Global Learning Crisis: EdTech and the Political

Proposal

As global trends in educational policy increasingly emphasise high-stakes accountability systems rooted in testing and evaluation to shape schooling practice and define educational ‘quality’, many have called to end such ‘toxic testing’ environments. In England, such warnings have galvanised organisations to raise awareness about the deleterious effects that such testing regimes have had on teaching and learning. As noted by The Times Education Commission (2022) ‘we need to consider a radical reset to ensure that the education system fulfils the potential of all children.’ This sense of urgency and crises was taken up by Rethinking Assessment (RA), a nonpartisan coalition of school leaders, researchers, policymakers, employers, and higher education representatives working to advance Learner Profiles (LPs) as a new policy solution.

LPs are proposed as a solution to diversify and rethink traditional educational assessment methods, and to adapt educational training and achievement to technological advancements in the job market. As an assessment alternative to the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSEs), LPs aim to replace narrow insights from high-stakes exams with a broader understanding of students' strengths, knowledge, and skills by combining a range of assessments such as vivas, digital badges, and extended investigations. The use of badges and credentialing, however, entail new forms of capitalization, and as such require new forms of measurement and value-conversion.

While LPs have begun expanding at the school level in the Global North, academic research has largely been absent from the conversation. This paper addresses this gap by examining a UK-based pilot project launched in 2022 by RA, addressing the following research questions: How and why did LPs gain traction as a policy solution within a network of actors with diverse interests? What are the characteristics of these actors, their relationships, and negotiations? What implications might LPs development have on the concept of assessment?

We use ‘network ethnography’ (Ball et al. 2017) to specify the exchanges and transactions between organisations involved in the advocacy and development of LPs in England, and the roles, actions, motivations, discourses, and resources of the different actors involved. Through close attention to practices, dynamics and the structure formed by actors within a policy network, we examined “the meaning-making and reshaping that occur through exchanges in social relations” as well as policy discourses “shared and enhanced in and by policy networks” (Santori & Holloway 2023, p. 509).

Our data collection involved Internet searches of LP’s policy network, online documents, and observations of social gatherings where network actors come together. The data was analysed using Foucault's (1988) notion of problematisation, extended by Bacchi (2009, 2012), which explores how problems are framed and solutions are produced. This paper offers an initial mapping of the LPs policy network, identifying key players and their connections, as well as their interests, transactions and exchanges. The rise of digital badges and micro-credentials seems to bring together new and old players into the educational assessment and certification ecosystem, as well as new tensions between public and private forms of provision and the need for new monitoring and articulation mechanisms.

Author

• Diego Santori, King's College London