Equity and Classroom Assessment: A Comparative Study between Quebec and Switzerland

• In Event: Teachers as change agents: Equitable education and practices

Proposal

Over the past twenty years, hundreds of educational systems around the world have been reformed, particularly in the name of excellence and educational equity (Van Avermaet, Van Houtte & Van den Branden, 2011). In many countries, equity has taken the form of compensatory educational policies aimed at remedying the unfair situations in which certain categories of pupils find themselves (Duru-Bellat & Mingat, 2011), such as pupils with learning and adjustment difficulties, young people from disadvantaged socioeconomic contexts and those of recent immigration. However, these pupils, despite political efforts, continue to have significantly lower academic results (Gomolla, 2006; Schleicher, 2014) and have less chance of accessing higher education (Maroy & Kamanzi, 2017).

The desire to associate performance and academic excellence with greater equity explains the growing interest in research on this subject for several years (Demeuse et al., 2003; Demeuse & Baye, 2008; Gorard & Smith, 2004; Gorard, 2007; Monseur & Crahay, 2008). Nevertheless, comparative research on the equity of education systems has on several occasions been based on quantitative data and on socio-demographic and institutional indicators, thus leaving in the shadows important characteristics that would make it possible to understand the origin of inequalities within schools and classrooms. Therefore, this project proposes to examine educational equity at the classroom level from a qualitative and comparative perspective in two social contexts: in Quebec and in Switzerland. These two contexts are said to be of “soft accountability” in education. Indeed, research carried out in these contexts has shown that external tests (eg ministerial examinations of students) have weak effects on teachers' practices. The essence of the evaluative activity is located in the interaction between teacher and students (Hutmacher, 2002), thus allowing teachers to have more leeway in their assessment practices (Rivkin, Hanushek & Kain, 2005); paradoxically, they are also subject to the logic of obligation of results and competition.

From an interactionist sociological perspective, we want to: 1) analyze and compare the points of view of Quebec and Swiss teachers on the social repercussions of their assessment practices as well as the links that may exist between these conceptions and their professional life stories; 2) understand the meaning that teachers give to the various conceptions of educational equity and their institutional framework; and, 3) explore what these teachers consider to be a fair assessment, in particular through the analysis of their assessment adaptations and arrangements to be more “fair”.

To achieve the proposed objectives, we conducted interviews with 11 secondary school teachers from Quebec and 8 secondary school teachers from Switzerland. The interviews had two stages: a first interview focused on the professional life stories of teachers and a second semi-structured interview focused on conceptions of equity. To analyze the data, we adopted a hybrid approach of qualitative methods of thematic analysis (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006), influenced by Schutz's social phenomenology (Schütz, 1932). This theory emphasizes the spatial and temporal aspects of experience and social relationships (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006). By trying to apprehend the understanding that individuals have of their actions in situ, it becomes possible to highlight the systems of typification and the domains of relevance resulting from the social phenomena of the lived world structuring the actions – but also being mobilized by – individuals (Poitras, 2019). Schütz was relevant for this research, because his approach makes it possible to consider concomitantly the subjectivity of the actor but also the social structures. Thus, the individual, in this paradigm, is considered to be both product and producer of social reality and of the systems or institutions that compose it (Berger and Luckmann, 2010 [1966]).

The data allowed us to capture the meaning generated by the actions of the school teachers within the evaluative activity at the secondary school level. Our research is focused on secondary school teachers, because it is at this level that the assessment of learning contains important social issues, particularly in the orientation of school populations in different post-secondary streams. The different school management of these federal systems is at the center of the comparison: the recent harmonization of the management of the cantonal education systems in Switzerland and the provincial autonomy of Quebec will shed light on the impact of the institutional framework on the practices and teacher autonomy regarding student assessment.

Author

• Adriana Morales Perlaza, Université De Montréal