A lovely colleague just asked me if I could recommend good critical literature on the purposes of assessment. I was able to suggest plenty of useful texts (Boud, Black and Wiliam, Hattie, McArthur, Fawns, Ajjawi and more) but I couldn’t find a recent critical overview that considers assessment purposes in the context of GenAI and other wicked problems. Please comment if you can think of something I’ve missed and I’ll send it on!

That set me wondering what I would say about the purposes of assessment in contemporary education. Here are some initial thoughts, I’d love any feedback. I’ve definitely been partly inspired here by Jen Ross’ fantastic recent keynote at the University of Edinburgh. Thanks also to the excellent colleagues I’ve written with about assessment over the years. I’m using assessment as a shorthand here for the whole prior knowledge and experience – guidance – assessment – feedback and its interpretation – using learning in the future cycle that I’ve written about with Dai Hounsell and others.

1. Assessment should provide rich ongoing insights for teachers and learners into what has been understood and what needs further consideration.
2. Assessment needs to enable learners to engage actively in the ways of thinking, being and doing of their academic disciplines and likely future contexts.
3. Assessment should build students’ capacity and will to evaluate their own and others work to prepare them for lifelong learning.
4. Assessment should give students a sense that they matter in contexts that matter to them and that they can belong there if that is what they desire.
5. Assessment needs to give learners experience of sitting with uncertainty and the ways in which futures emerge unpredictably. Learners need to be able to meet uncertainty together and explore possible outcomes without letting the need to know the answer take over.
6. Assessment should engage learners in working hospitably across boundaries, welcoming unknown and unknowable others openly in a spirit of collaboration.
7. In the context of GenAI, assessment needs to draw students into the ongoing, reflexive, tough, iterative, cycles of learning and relearning that are needed for true depth of understanding and which are at risk if student use AI uncritically.
8. Assessment must serve social justice by valuing diverse ways of knowing, being and doing. It can otherwise be the most powerful mechanism by which minoritised groups are excluded.
9. Assessment must offer learners opportunities to try on new and transformative frames of reference on the world.
10. Assessment needs to give students opportunities to consider pressing global challenges, the ways in which they themselves are enmeshed in these issues, and the ethical considerations that arise from this.
11. Assessment needs to provide trustworthy signals to employers and educational admissions that learners have the capabilities that they seek. This aspect of assessments tends to be over emphasised but it is needed and is probably the reason we can’t escape some closed book examinations for larger class sizes.

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