Perspectives On Alternative Assessment Reform

Perspectives on Alternative Assessment Reform
Author(s): Andy Hargreaves, Lorna Earl, Michele Schmidt

Source: American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 69-95
Published by: American Educational Research Association
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American Educational ResearchJournal

Spring 2002, Vol.39, No. 1, pp. 69-95
Perspectives on Alternative
Assessment Reform
Andy Hargreaves and Lora Earl
Ontario Institutefor Studies in Education
of the University of Toronto
Michele Schmidt
Texas A&M University
This article examines classroom assessment reformfrom four perspectives:
technological, cultural, political, andpostmodern. Each perspective highlights
different issues and problems in the phenomenon of classroom assessment.
The technological perspective focuses on issues of organization, structure,
strategy, and skill in developing new assessment techniques. The culturalperspective examines how alternative assessments are interpretedand integrated
into the social and cultural context of schools. Thepoliticalperspective views
assessment issues as being embedded in and resultingfrom the dynamics of
power and control in human interaction. Here assessment problems are
caused by inappropriate use, political and bureaucratic interference, or
institutional priorities and requirements. Last, the postmodern perspective is
based on the view that in today's complex and uncertain world, human
beings are not completely knowable and that "authentic" experiences and
ANDY HARGREAVESis Co-director
of the International
Centre for Educational
Change and a Professor of Theory and Policy Studies in Education at the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West,
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada. His areas of specialization are the emotional
geographies and emotional politics of teaching and leading and the relationship
between teacher effectiveness and teacher development.
LORNAEARLis Co-director of the International Centre for Educational Change and
an Associate Professor of Theory and Policy Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West,
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada. Her areas of specialization are assessment, evaluation, and large-scale reform. In particular, she focuses on the interface between
research, policy, and practice.
MICHELESCHMIDTis an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, Commerce,
Department of Educational Administration, Commerce, TX 75429-3011. Her current

research interests include the impact of whole-school reform on teachers' learning
and practice and the emotions of teachers and leaders.
Hargreaves, Earl, and Schmidt

assessments are fundamentally questionable. Using a semi-structured interview protocol, teachers were asked about their personal understanding of
alternative forms of assessment; about how they had acquired this understanding; how they integrated changes into theirpractices; what these practices looked like; what successes and obstacles they encountered during
implementation; and what support systems had been providedfor them.
classroomassessment, multipleperspectives,middleyears teachers.
KEYWORDS:
Assessment-led reform is now one of the most widely favored strategies to
Lpromote higher standardsof teaching, more powerful learning, and more
credible forms of public accountability (Murphy & Broadfoot, 1995; Gipps,
1994; Black, 1998). Although large-scale, legislated assessments receive the
most attention, classroom assessments matter most of all. They drive student
pedagogy and student learning(Stiggins,1990). Manyeducational reformshave
heralded new classroom assessment approaches that go beyond traditional
paper-and-pencil techniques to include strategies such as performance- and
portfolio-based assessment (Marzano, Pickering, & McTighe, 1993; Stiggins,
1997). Such alternativeassessments are often intended to motivate students to
take more responsibilityfor their own learning,to make assessment an integral
part of the learning experience, and to embed it in authentic activitiesthat recognize and stimulate students' abilities to create and apply a wide range of
knowledge, ratherthan simply engaging in acts of memorizationand basic skill
development (Wolf, D., Bixby,J., Glenn,J., & Gardner,H., 1991;Earl& Cousins,
1995; Stiggins, 1997). The point of alternativeclassroom assessments, however
they are labeled, is not that they are ends in themselves but that they are
designed to foster powerful, productive learning for students.
Changes in classroom assessment represent major paradigm shifts in
thinking about learning, schools, and teaching. Alternativeclassroom assessment requires that teachers use their judgments about children's knowledge,
understand how to include feedback in the teaching process, decide how to
meet students' varying learning needs (Tunstall & Gipps, 1995), and learn
how to share decision making about learning and teaching with colleagues,
parents, and students (Stiggins, 1997; Gipps, 1994). It means rethinking what
assessment and teaching are for, how they can best support learning, and
what kinds of curriculum goals, coverage, and standards they can help fulfill (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998).
The paradigm shift in classroom assessment is certainly controversial,
but we believe that it is not yet controversial enough. What are the implications of introducing alternative assessments? What purposes, functions, and
unintended consequences might alternative assessments actually serve or
produce, and how do various assessment purposes differ?How do creative
classroom assessments mesh with standardized systemic ones? Do classroom
assessments always operate as they should? Are they, under closer scrutiny,
always really what they seem? When do they rigorously raise standards and
when do they superficially simulate them?What are the serious risks of alter70

native classroom assessments, as well as the opportunities? Are classroombased assessments always humanistic and benign in their implications for
supporting student learning and development, or can they sometimes
amount to sinister ways of exercising endless surveillance over the young?
In our view, these are some of the deep questions that need to be asked
about alternative classroom assessments, questions about their basic purposes, meanings, and consequences that extend far beyond technical matters of implementation.
This article is a way of arrestingour own ardor for classroom assessment
reform so we can step back and reflect on it criticallyand carefully. One way
to do this is by looking at classroom assessment reform through different conceptual lenses or perspectives. As a far-reaching and high-stakes innovation,
assessment reform is a prime candidate for House's (1981) classic and critical
treatment of educational innovation. He examines educational innovation
from three perspectives: technological, cultural, and political. Each perspective exposes different issues and problems in the phenomenon of innovation.
In this article, we apply House's three perspectives to assessment reform.
Given the time that has elapsed since House's article and the ways the world
has changed, we have also added a fourth perspective: a postmodern one.
As we employ and apply these four perspectives, we will draw on a study
that we conducted of how a group of change-oriented teachers who were
committed to alternative forms of assessment (among other changes) interpreted and implemented these assessment innovations in their own classrooms (see Hargreaves, Earl,Moore, & Manning, 2001, for the full study). Our
aim therefore is not to present exhaustive findings of the study, but to draw
on the study, where relevant and where the data permit, to illustrate and
exemplify in concrete terms the various perspectives on classroom assessment
reform--bearing in mind that our own particulardatabase does not permit us
to illustrate all of the critical points that we make in empirical terms.
The Study
Our study focuses on 29 Grade 7 and 8 teachers in Ontario, Canada, who
were identified by school system administrators as being committed to
implementing changes concerning curriculum integration, broadly defined
learning outcomes, and alternative forms of assessment and reporting that
were embedded in a new curriculum policy. The new curriculumpolicy was
developed in the early 1990s and consolidated in a key document (Ontario
Ministryof Education and Training, 1995), one year before the election of an
ultraconservative government in 1996. The wide-ranging educational reform
efforts in Grades 7-9 emphasized basing the curriculum around broadly
defined common learning outcomes, encouraging moves toward greater curriculum integration, implementing mandatory detracking (destreaming), and
developing a related set of performance-based assessments. All of these measures were designed to create a high-quality and inclusive educational system that would retain and engage young adolescents of all backgrounds in
the educational process.
71

Specifically, the new curriculum policy comprised three closely interrelated components:
* Outcomes: The curriculum policy specified 10 very broad "Essential Outcomes" organized into four broad program areas-"The
arts," "Language," "Mathematics/Science/Technology," and "Self
and Society." Within each of these areas, outcomes were specified
as knowledge, skills, and values that students were expected to have
developed at the end of Grades 3, 6, and 9. There were no prescriptive guidelines for teaching and learning or curriculum delivery.
Teachers were expected to review the outcomes and plan learning
activities that would enable students to achieve the outcomes.
* Integrated Curriculum: The curriculum policy promoted integrated
learning by grouping subjects into the four broad program areas and
explicitly encouraging teachers to make connections across them.
* Assessment:Teachers were expected to assess progress toward the
outcomes by developing curriculum, planning rubrics, identifying
indicators of reaching the outcomes, developing appropriate modifications for individual students, assessing both the process and the
product of learning, encouraging self-assessment, and using frequent
and varied assessments. In addition, teachers were responsible for
communicating the assessment changes to the parents of their students. By and large, these assessment practices were encouraged
through alignment with the curriculum and the support of school
districts, ratherthan being legislatively enforced.
Before this curriculumpolicy change, there had been no province-wide program of assessment beyond sample assessments designed for curriculum
review. Assessment was exclusively in the purview of the classroom teacher.
With the advent of the new Conservative government in 1996, assessment policy changed, particularlyin terms of the development of provincewide standardized testing, including a literacy test taken by all students in
Grade 9 for the first time in 2000. Beginning in 2002, high school graduation will be contingent on passing the literacy test. Even in this new climate
of reform, however, we are seeing that many of the other alternative assessment and reporting practices described in this article persist in Ontario
classrooms alongside the more standardized assessments, albeit to a lesser
extent.
Our article therefore returns to a recent historical moment before standards and their related assessments were narrowed, tightened, made more
specific and prolific, and imposed more forcefully. We aim to recapture the
principles and practices of other kinds of assessment than standardized ones.
By examining this crucial moment, we hope to rekindle debates not only
about what was worth fighting for in education before standardized
assessment practices, but also about what continues to be worth fighting
for beyond those practices. In some places, such as England and Australia,
the experience of a decade of standardized assessment reform is already
72

leading to an easing of mandated curriculum and assessment expectations
and to a re-embracing of more flexible, learning-based, student-centered
alternatives.
Our study used a semistructuredinterview protocol to ask teachers about
their personal understanding of alternativeforms of assessment and other initiatives; about how they had acquired that understanding; how they integrated changes into their practices; what those practices looked like; what
successes and obstacles the teachers had encountered during implementation; and what supports had been provided for them. We observed for up to
10 days in each of four teachers' classrooms, and all participantswere invited
to attend several meetings to interact with other teachers in the project.
The Technological
Perspective
According to House (1981), the technological perspective assumes that

teaching and innovation are technologies with predictable solutions that can
be transferredfrom one situation to another. The focus of this perspective is
on the innovation itself, on its characteristics and component parts and its
production and introduction as a technology. The underlying assumption in
a technological perspective is that everyone shares a common interest in
advancing the innovation. The only remaining issue is how best to implement
it (House, 1981).
Applied to the field of assessment reform, the technological perspective

focuses on issues of organization, structure,strategy, and skill in developing
new assessment techniques. From this standpoint, alternativeassessment is a
complex technology that requiressophisticatedexpertise in, for example, devising valid and reliable measures for performance-based assessments in classrooms, which will capture the complexities of student performance (Torrance,
1995). The challenge of alternative assessment, in this view, is not only to
develop defensible technologies that are meaningful and fair but for teachers
to develop the understandingsand skills necessary to integrateassessment techniques, such as performance-based assessment, portfolios, self-assessment,
video journals,and exhibitions, into their practice. Stiggins (1995) writes about
the assessment illiteracythat pervades schools and suggests that:
Withouta crystalclearview of the meaningof academicsuccess and
without the abilityto translatethat vision into high qualityassessments, we will remainunable to assist studentsin attaininghigher
levels of academicachievementeffectivelyand to be able to integrate
them into theirpractice.(Stiggins,1995,p. 238)
Classroom assessments present a morass of technological issues. Alternative assessments take time (Stiggins, 1997); they bring concerns about reliability and validity (Linn, Baker, & Dunbar, 1991); they are sometimes hard to
untangle from instruction (Khattri & Kane, 1995); they are often not well
described (Stiggins & Bridgeford, 1985); and they frequently presume that
73

teachers already have the necessary skills to implement them (Earl & Cousins,
1995). Alternative classroom assessment is a new world for teachers, most of
whom have very little (if any) assessment training, often lack fundamental
measurement knowledge (Stiggins, 1991), and generally feel uncomfortable
about the quality of their assessments (Stiggins, 1991; Hargreaves, Earl,
Moore, & Manning, 2001). Teachers are having to become more sophisticated in their implementation of new assessment strategies (Cunningham,
1998). Contemporaneous with teachers' struggles to become more proficient
assessors, many institutional constraints make implementing these assessments
difficult. Insufficient time, resources, professional development, and consultancy support for teachers to become virtuoso performers with the new strategies are but a few of the problems (Stiggins, 1997).
The technological challenges of alternative assessment reform are repeatedly evident in our own data. Teachers often had great difficulty knowing
how to measure outcomes. They raised questions about how indicators of the
learning outcomes could be developed into reliable tools for measuring them.
"The hardest part of introducing essential learning outcomes," said one
teacher, "is how do you assess these outcomes?" "I think that's where I see a
lot of teachers struggling." One exasperated teacher complained,
What is an "exceeds outcome," for example, in reading in a Grade 7
class? What is it?No one has really told us. For example, if your outcome was-and these are from the list that they gave us-"reads
widely and diversely," well, what does "exceeds" mean? Does that
mean that they read 20 books a term, 40 books a term? No one is
really clear. When you begin to look at outcomes critically, well, if
you want me to evaluate the skill, what does it really mean? I don't
see the Ministrygiving us that! I don't see the Board [i.e., district]giving us that.
For such teachers, the complexity of the outcomes-based
was formidable. One described it as follows:
assessment system
How do we measure the indicators for the outcomes? We say this is

the beginning and middle for this particularoutcome and you know
at Grade 9, you are talking about 3, 4, 5 dimensional matrices to really
be able to understand it. There are too many twists and turns. If
there's too much there to start with, how do you assess the "too
much"?
The technological challenge of linking assessment and reporting practices to outcomes and indicators was a difficult one. With effort and experimentation though, teachers began to devise ways to approach this new task.
Not so heavy on the testing; [our guidelines stress] conferences,
essays, independent studies, interviews, inventions, journals, observations, peer evaluations, portfolios, presentations, projects, reports,
74

self evaluations, simulations, tests, videos. Testing is just a very tiny
spot for me, as a teacher, in assessing their knowledge.
They have tests for that unit in the textbook, but I also have peer
evaluations; I have group evaluations, self evaluations; I have videos
where we talk about, "did they follow instructions?"
As they broadened their assessment repertoires, teachers also confronted
problems in terms of their schools' ability to accommodate implementation.
Time is one of the most frequently cited problems in regard to implementing alternative assessment (Stiggins, 1995; Cunningham, 1998). Writing anecdotal comments, undertaking one-to-one conferencing and managing the
expanding armory of assessment technology placed teachers under huge
time pressures (Wilson, 1996). As one teacher put it, "I would really love to
do anecdotal [reports] but I resent the amount of time that it would take me."
Other teachers felt guilty about habitually being behind with their marking,
or about conferencing with individual students when others in the class
might not be working.
In another study in which one of us was involved, one teacher, who
had committed himself to using portfolio assessment, wrote how he quickly
found himself in a "portfolio prison"-a prisoner of time.
As the deadline for the completed portfolios approached, all of our
work on the old curriculum came to a halt, and I spent most of the
class time conferring with the students about their portfolios. The low
point came on the day when the other teachers on my team joined
most of the students on a field trip and I stayed behind at school to
work with 12 students who had not completed their portfolios. Guilty!
This was the beginning of my sentence in portfolio prison. In the
months ahead, I felt as if I had to give up many things, including an
enormous amount of time both in school and out of school, to work
on the portfolio. (Adelman, Walking-Eagle,& Hargreaves, 1997, p. 19)
An equally challenging problem for teachers was communicating the
changes in assessment to parents. This was especially difficult because the
report card was often inconsistent with the approaches to assessment that
teachers were using.
We had a lot of trouble this year because the marks don't mesh with
the [new, outcomes-based] report card. I can certainly see if a kid is
exceeding or meeting [the outcomes], but then when you have to
match that with a mark, that's where we're having trouble.
In summary, the technological perspective on alternative assessment
reform draws attention to the difficulties of devising and refining valid forms
of measurement; to the challenge teachers face when acquiring a wider
range of assessment skills and strategies; to the need to harmonize assessment expectations between home and school and across school levels; and
to the issue of time and resources that help or hinder the introduction of new
assessment practices into the routines of the school.
75

But there is much more to alternative assessment reform than refining
measurement technology, developing teachers' assessment literacy, and
managing the organization's capacity to implement the change. Some of the
assessment problems that manifest themselves as technological issues of
implementation go beyond the assessments themselves. They are caused by
inappropriate use, political and bureaucratic interference (Broadfoot, 1996),
or institutional priorities and requirements that can mitigate against any significant changes in assessment (Wilson, 1996). To understand what else is at
stake in alternative classroom assessment reform, we need to turn to the
other three perspectives.
The Cultural Perspective
According to House (1981), the cultural perspective allows an investigation
of how innovations are interpreted and integrated into the social and cultural
context of schools. He suggests that the innovation process is actually an
interaction of cultures. Change is conceived as blending new ideas with a
cultural history. In the cultural perspective, the challenge of assessment
reform is one of reculturing (Fullan, 1993; Hargreaves, 1994) or rethinking
the nature and purpose of classroom assessment. The innovation of classroom assessment reform involves many new strategies. Historically, classroom assessment has been the hurdle that students needed to overcome to
show they were ready for the next stage. It occurred at the end of instruction, that is, the end of a class, a unit, a semester, or a school year, and was
a symbol of completion and a comment on the adequacy of learning. The
substance of learning was much less importantthan teachers' collective judgments about their students' learning potential, as demonstrated in routine
classroom tests and exams. This approach to assessment generated the currency (i.e., grades) that students (and their parents) used in the educational
marketplace.
Alternativeclassroom assessment, however, is seen as an integral part of,
or the window into, learning (Earl & LeMahieu, 1997; Wiggins & McTighe,
1998; Broadfoot, 1996). It is concerned less with categorizing than with
developing a common understanding through dialogue about when learning
occurs. Such assessment must therefore be sufficiently sensitive to detect the
mental representations that students hold of important ideas and the facility
with which they bring understandings to bear in solving their problems
(Shepard, 1991). This kind of assessment has been described as "authentic,"
defined by Wiggins (1989), a leader in the authentic assessment movement, as
the core tasks/criteria/context
studentworkthatreplicates/simulates
done by performersin that field. Thus findinga researchproblem,
designing the experiment,de-bugging the design, publishing the
results, defending them against counter-evidence and counterargumentis "doing"science authentically(as opposed to cookbook
science labs that are reallyjust hands-onlessons). Similarly,mathematiciansdon'tfillout worksheetsfora living-they applymathmod76

ellingto problemstheoreticaland practical,etc. Authenticshouldnot,
in my judgement,be defined as relevantor meaningfulto kids, as
some writersdo. This is a telling mistaketo me, indicatingthat the
defineris not thinkinglike an assessorworryingabout validityand
(as opposed to thinkinglike a teachermakingrealwork
predictability
accessibleand interestingin class). (Wiggins,1989)
Wiggins claims that authentic assessment is multidirectional,direct, deep, and
relies heavily on teachers' judgments. Students engage in "realtasks" under
the watchful eye of a teacher (or teachers) who control the agenda and make
positive use of the opportunities for feedback (Torrance, 1998). The assessment criteriaare not hidden or mysterious. Teachers are encouraged to teach
to the test, because the tasks for students comprise real situations that students need to master for success (Cunningham, 1998). Wiggins and McTighe
(1998) argue that assessment and curriculumare two inextricably intertwined
threads in learning. Moving to authentic assessment signals a shift away from
curriculum coverage and associated assessments based on correct or incorrect answers, toward "uncoverage"(i.e., making what is interesting and vital
about a topic real for students by exploring). This approach involves dialogue
with and among students and includes constant reassessment and ongoing
self-assessment. Students are not, in these instances, passive recipients of the
wisdom of teachers' judgments about their learning. They are active, engaged,
and challenged contributors to their own learning.
The report by the Ontario Ministryof Education and Training (1995) did
not specifically advocate "authentic assessment" in precisely these words.
However, several of its five key recommendations were consistent with
authentic assessment principles, particularlythe following:
* "[A]ssessmentmust involve the use of a wide varietyof methods so that
the evaluation of students' achievement is as accurate as possible."
* "[A]ssessment,evaluation and reporting are the responsibility of the
teacher, who must consider the needs of individual students and
work closely with them and their families. It is important that teachers involve students and parents in making decisions about student
progress and programs."
* "[A]ssessment,evaluation and reporting are continuous and essential parts of curriculum and effective classroom practice."
(Ontario Ministryof Education and Training, 1995, p. 21)
A few of the teachers in our study referred to approaches that might be
called "authentic."Some teachers involved students in the assessment exercise, for example. They felt that openness was very important: "[T]hekids
understand whenever [I] evaluate [students] on something; they generally
know how they're going to be evaluated." Another teacher was proud that
"everythingI do, the kids get up front. EverythingI want them to learn, they
get up front. How they are going to be evaluated, they get up front. There is
no mystery."Sharing outcomes with students was important:"showing them
first what exactly you are marking, [so] it allows them to know exactly what
77

the expectations are."For example, one teacher reported letting students see
on the computer how their marks had been calculated, which "theyreally like
to see." Specifying and sharing assessment criteria in that way was seen as
increasing students' own understandingabout their learning and achievement:
For us that's really becoming important to get the kids to see it's not
just a good job but why it's a good job, and to see I got this mark
because I met this criterion or I didn't meet this criterion.
Many teachers in our study wanted "evaluation [that] could be a com-
fortable interplay between student and teacher." That interplay would comprise more emphasis on student self-assessment, more joint reviews of
progress between students and their teachers, more sharing of assessment
targets with students, and more active partnerships between teachers, students, and their parents in discussions about progress. In the area of selfassessment, for example, teachers valued students' assessments of their own
individual progress or the progress of their group. They liked portfolios
because they could help students develop greater independence by encouraging them to set up their own learning plan.
When I do a rubric, I have teacher, peer, and self at the top, and we
use the same criteria.They use it and their peers use it and we do a
comparison. If you're going to demand excellence, you can set it so
nobody can reach it or you can build to it. We are building to it, really
thinking about what you are assessing and how you are going to do it.
I worked the unit so that they self-evaluate and peer-evaluate
and have very specific criteriato go by. And they are really very good.
They are pretty accurate. I thought they would all give themselves
glowing marks, but they were pretty close to my own.
Some teachers also put great store on involving students in devising and
applying the evaluation criteria themselves as an integral part of the learning experience and as a responsibility that they have taken upon themselves,
together with their teacher.
We sat down and we talked about the writing outcome, how to present material in different ways to different audiences. And then we
looked at different ways in which this should be evaluated, and the
kids and I made up the evaluation criteria together, and then they
assessed what it should be out of 5 or 6 for each particularcriterion
that we came up with.
Ideally, the students generate the criteriafor the evaluation, they
talk about it and then we weight it. Last term, they wrote a creation
myth as the major piece of writing. We talked about ... what would
you see in a creation myth? Well, these are the characteristics. And,
in a good piece of writing, these are the characteristics.And from that
comes the evaluation. So they essentially generate the evaluation criteria, and that is what I use to evaluate their work.
78

Having made assessment criteria explicit, some teachers devised strategies for students to reflect on them and use them as a basis for their own
learning. In that way, assessment and learning could begin to be integrated.
Weekly,we have a reflectionon the week's learning,and the kids
need to identifywhat learningthey have done, as well as what outcomes they have addressed.Thatis the time for theirself-reflection
in termsof "HaveI made progresswith this or not?"
As we are completingwork,we often stop and reflect."Allright,
what outcome does this meet?"We begin to make connections.
Teachers' assessment roles dramaticallychanged in authentic assessment.
They became collaborators in their students' learning. There was no mystery.
The quest for deep understanding was a shared one. Teachers not only interacted intensely with the students but also collaborated with one another to
build a strong base for their strategicadvice, direction, and judgments. Instead
of working in isolation, they worked together to learn from what others had
already done, and shared their thoughts about teaching and learning as a way
of supporting their own reflection and understanding (Allen, 1998).
In an authentic assessment system, parents are also collaborators in their
children's learning. In a traditionalassessment paradigm, parents are the passive recipients of the coveted report card, a carefully constructed summary
of their child's learning-usually as a series of numerical representations,
with a small number of comments. In an authentic learning and assessment
situation, the parents are partners. This is perhaps the most threatening step
for teachers to take. As Allen (1998) says,
except for the "shiningexamples"which tend to reflectwell on student and teacheralike, samples of studentwork are rarely,if ever,
seen by anybody besides the teacher and the student. Teachers
recognise that in exposing students'work, they are exposing their
own work to scrutiny(p. 9)
In this view, parents and teachers often differed in their expectations
about how student achievement should be measured. The mutual understanding that is at the heart of the cultural perspective remained an elusive
goal in many parent-teacher relationships concerned with assessment. As one
teacher noted,
The faultmay be with the modifications.You still averagein those
"modifiedstudents,"so it'snot a truepictureof where theirchildfalls
in the class.Eventhoughyou writeon the reportcard"modifiedprogram,"they don'tsee that,they see the mark.Parentswould love to
see how theirchild stacksup in class, positionin the class.
In the cultural perspective, the danger is that teachers and parents or
teachers and students, will "talk past" each other, because they are using
79

differentassessment criteria.For instance, teachers may be measuring children
against a standard, whereas parents want them to be measured against each
other (criterion- vs. norm-referenced). The solution is to build better understanding by clarifying assessment criteria, making them transparent, and,
where possible, involving students and parents in developing and discussing
assessment criteriawith teachers. Taking the mystery out of grading and the
arbitrarinessout of judgment can help build understanding with parents as
well as students, as many of the teachers we studied were able to confirm.
Some teachers sent outcomes and assessment criteriahome with the students
and included them in a newsletter so that they could be placed on the wall,
on the refrigerator,or in a notebook if parents wished. One teacher explained
how she carefully disaggregated students' marks so that the criteriaand evidence through which they had been created were open, accessible, and clear.
I have all my marksbroken down so they [the students]can see
exactlywhere they are in theirmarks,and I do a marksverification
exercise. They like the fact that they know exactly how theirmark
was calculated.They mightnot like the markbut they perceiveit as
beinga lot moreobjectiveso that,when the parentscome in forinterviews, I havethatreadyforthem.Forthe interviews,I have the whole
listof theirmarksto dateon paperfor themand I put it down in front
of them.
Within the cultural perspective of authentic assessment, the task of educators is not to pander to popular prejudices and assumptions about assessment but to deepen everyone's understanding of learning and assessment
issues. This means not only explaining assessment criteria more clearly and
openly but also developing them with the cooperation of others, especially
students, whenever feasible. Developing this collaborative understanding
with parents is as important as it is with students. Some of the teachers found
that this goal could be achieved through multiple strategies:
1.
2.
80
Having studentsfill out a sheet indicating their strengths, needs and

highlights of the term to share with theirparents:
I feel thatwhen we're interviewingand the studentsare also letting
their parentsknow where they are at and where they should be
going, the parentsfeel very comfortable.
Using portfolios to get students and their parents to talk together
beforeparent interview night:
I reallyliked the way the interviewswent this time. I thinkit really
improvedcommunicationnot only between the kids and the parents, but between the kids, the parentsand the teacher and the
school. Therejust seemed to be a more comfortableair about the
interviews.Itwasn'tlike people were worriedaboutcomingin, and
whatam I going to hearaboutmy child?Theybasicallyknew ahead
of time.It justgave themtime to sortthroughtheirthoughtsso that
they could come in and reallydiscussit; not justbe talkedat.

3.
Three-way interviews, involving parents, students, and teachers

together:
When we did reports this time, we had three staff interviews after
the reports went home. Both the parents and the child came to the
interview. Before the child came in, they had a chance to go over
what they thought their areas of strength and weaknesses were and
ways they felt that they could improve. So when they came to the
interview, we had the report to go from, we had what the child felt
were his/her areas of strength and weakness and the teacher's if
they differed from the child's. The parents also had time ahead of
time to write things, so that when we came in everybody was organized for the interview and knew the types of things that were going
to be discussed. I think it really improved the communication not
only between the kids and the parents but between the kids, the
parents and the teacher and the school. Not one parent came to (the
principal) with concerns about the interview.
4.
Using a daily agenda to maintain continuous contact with parents:

The kids keep track in their agenda of the work that they have, and
every night they need to get it signed by the parents. Parents or students can write me a note in their agenda if the student has had
trouble with something, and I write back. I could be writing to the
student, I could be writing to the parent. This is an area for continual contact with the parents daily.
5.
Informal contacts with parents beyond written reportsand agendas

orformal meetings:
Lastyear I had time and actually called parents up from time to time
when a kid had written a particularlygood lab report and say I just
wanted to let you know that so and so hadn't been doing so well,
and all of a sudden they hand in this wonderful lab report and I'm
impressed with it. That earns me brownie points; the payoff is phenomenal. The parents are so happy.
In summary, a cultural perspective of classroom assessment emphasizes

the interplay among points of view, values, and beliefs. Viewed this way, the
task of developing alternative assessment moves far beyond technological
matters of measurement, skill, coordination, and existing relationships into
the area of establishing communication and building understanding among
all those involved in the assessment exercise.
The Political Perspective

The political perspective on educational innovation, in House's (1981) view,
involves the exercise and negotiation of power, authority, and competing
interests among groups. A political perspective on alternative assessment recognizes that all assessments involve acts of power, and it identifies the problems of implementing alternative classroom assessment as moving beyond
issues of technical coordination and human communication to encompass
the power struggles among ideologies and interest groups in schools and
81

societies. A political perspective also treats alternative classroom assessment
as itself being problematic-as a strategy that might not empower people but
could become a sophisticated new form of selection and surveillance.
Torrance and Pryor(1995) identify two conceptually distinct approaches
to classroom assessment. In convergent assessment, the important thing is to
know if the child knows, understands, or can do a predetermined thing. The
power of decision making resides clearly with the teacher. Divergent assessment, on the other hand, emphasizes the learner's understanding ratherthan
the agenda of the assessor. Here, the focus is discovering what the child
knows, understands, or can do. Students have to accept some responsibility
for learning, and teachers are charged with creating the conditions for this
to occur. Assessment is part of the process. The underlying philosophy of
many of the alternative approaches to classroom assessment is that assessment is an essential part of learning. It is the feedback loop that allows teachers, students, and parents to identify the extent to which learning has
occurred and to shape their actions for the next stage of learning (Earl &
LeMahieu, 1997; Gipps, 1994; Stiggins, 1995). Divergent classroom assessment reforms make it important that assessment criteria be transparent,
equally available to all, and publicly contestable in their application; that
assessment criteria are known to students and often developed collaboratively with them so that better understanding can be developed and classroom power can be redistributed; that assessment judgments are acts of
explicit negotiation among all those involved; and that assessment processes
move in many directions from student to student, from student to teacher,
and between parents and teachers, for example, as well as from teacher to
student. Teachers in our study who engaged students and their parents in
assessment were explicitly aware of these issues.
I like the idea of talkingto the studentsand the parentsboth at the
same time. The power of the portfolioconferenceis that [students
have]an opportunityto talkaboutwhat they have done, where they
are going, and what theirgoals are. [Theyhave]tremendouspower,
andyou can see it in the parents'faces thatthey [have]reallylistened
to what their son and daughterhad been doing. They [have]really
understoodit, and it relatedto the reportcard.
The political potential of alternative assessment strategies was most
apparent when teachers invited evaluation of themselves, that is, when
assessment moved in more than one direction. Some teachers appreciated
that their own practice could be opened to scrutiny, and they used assessment to help them reflect on and change the way they taught.
I ask the kids at the end, "Wherecould I have changedthings?What
was the most difficultthingin this unit?If you were the teacher,how
would you changeit?"to help me out so thatnext yearwhen I teach
it I look back and see where I can makethose changes,to help them
out. I'mgettingfeedback,and I'mtryingto learnfromtheirfeedback
where I can improvethe course.
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If alternative assessment promises to establish more positive micropolitical relationships among teachers, students, and parents, it is politics too, at
the micro and macro levels, that can undermine the successful implementation of these new strategies. For example, high schools pressure their elementary colleagues to use more conventional forms of measurement and
reporting. So do parents. Coordinating expectations across communities and
systems is a considerable political challenge for assessment reformers as well
as a technical challenge. Teachers in one school district, for example, had to
deal with a complex and demanding new literacy profile that had to be
administered to all their students.
Thereis now this literacyreportthat[allstudents]musthave following them fromkindergartento grade 12. It is an amazingamountof
work to be done by the teacheron each student.[Teachers]have to
have three samplesof writing,which has to have five pages of correlatingcheckmarksto go through,throughouteach year, on each
studentthey teach.Andit involvesassessmenton an individualbasis,
and I don't know how they are going to do this.
[The]literacyassessmentprofile[is]a lot of workand a lot of testing. There'sjustso muchgoing on thatall you'redoing is testing.All
you're doing is assessment.There'svery little so-called teaching/
learninggoing on because we're spendingso much time testing.
Many of these contradictions are embedded in assessment policy itself.
They represent different points of view about assessment held by teachers,
on the one hand, and by educational policymakers and the real and imagined public to whom they cater, on the other. These contradictoryforces have
made assessment reform a schizophrenic activity (Earl & LeMaheiu, 1997;
Firestone, Mayrowetz, & Fairman, 1998). It is hard to expect teachers to harmonize their assessment practices when policymakers and the wider public
cannot.
These inconsistencies are deeply embedded in policy (Nuttall, 1994;
Darling-Hammond, 1992). One group of reformers holds that educational
change and improved student learning are the responsibility of some external individual or group in authority with the power to judge quality, exercise control, and order compliance. Assessment is used as the mechanism to
provide evidence for these decisions. Hard, numerical, standardized, and
comparable assessment data culled from examinations or objective tests,
applied consistently to large populations, are what these groups of reformers desire. This view is often based on the assumption that teachers have
both the capacity and the ability to act in different, more productive ways
but are unfocused, recalcitrant, lazy, or unmotivated. The obvious remedy
for increasing student learning is to apply pressure and issue educational
reform directives.
Other reformers believe that educational change and improved student
learning are largely internal processes that the people who live and work in
classrooms must undertake. The major purpose of assessment in this case is
83

to help teachers and students improve classroom learning. Assessment is an
opportunity for them to reflect, question, plan, teach, study, and learn. Assessment reform is not connected to compliance with mandates but is rooted in
the constructivist view that learning depends on self-monitoring and reflection. Reformers committed to this stance assume that many teachers do not
have current knowledge or skills about changing theories of learning or
assessment (the technological perspective) and require support to acquire
knowledge and training before they can change their practices. Assessment
reform, then, provides an opportunity for teachers to share ideas and discuss
their standards together, achieve agreement about consistent and equitable
expectations for quality, and create feedback loops directed toward changing the way they teach (the cultural perspective).
The political and practical conundrum for teachers is that policymakers
often avoid choosing between these differentvalue positions about educational
change and the reform groups that support them. To maintain support and
avoid criticism, policymakers often blur the issues and try to appeal to both
camps (Hargreaves, Earl, & Ryan, 1996; Firestone, Mayrowetz, & Fairman,
1998), embracing common standardsand individualvariation,numerical comparabilityand descriptive sensitivity,to both improve individual student learning and placate demands for system-wide accountability.Teachers are left to
cope with the consequences-consequences that even the most changeoriented teachers find exasperating. Resolving these contradictions should
therefore be a political problem for policymakers and not merely a practical
problem for teachers.
In the United States and elsewhere, one disturbing trend is that more
standardized assessments and the demands that they place on teachers and
students have become by far the more dominant of the two reform patterns.
In the United States, for example, states such as Massachusetts have instantaneously eclipsed alternative assessments focused on classroom learning
with content-loaded curriculum reforms and their associated assessments
(Oakes, Quartz, Ryan, & Lipton, 2000). In states such as Virginia, broadbased reforms oriented toward outcomes, and the flexible assessments that
accompanied them and that enabled teachers to address the individual needs
of their diverse students, have been attacked, then reversed in favor of more
conventional, standardized forms, as a result of pressure from elite parents'
groups (Nespor, forthcoming). Meanwhile, research that my colleagues and
I are undertaking for the Spencer Foundation, entitled Change Over Time
(on 30 years of secondary education in Canada and New York State) reveals
a more gradual encroachment of standardized assessments in New York
State over a 7-year period, culminating in high-stakes, content-based assessments in five subjects. Moreover, graduation depends on demonstrating minimum competency in all these subjects and their assessments. Our evidence
is that this is leading teachers either to abandon teaching practices that inclusively address the varying needs of all their students in favor of rote test
preparation, or to exhaust themselves preparing students for the tests at the
same time as assisting students with assessments that enable them to demon84

strate more sophisticated learning through performances and exhibitions
(Hargreaves, in press, chapter 3).
The political perspective does not simply illuminate the differences
between traditional and alternative assessment practices and pit them and
their advocates against each other, as if this were some kind of war between
good and evil. It also highlights the political risks and excesses of alternative
assessment practices themselves. Nowhere is this more true than in the
assessment of affect. In entering the affective domain of student assessment,
beyond the customary preoccupation with effort, teachers in our study confronted serious and significant obstacles. In general, most of them tried to
evaluate more than students' intellect. The way many teachers described
how they actually assessed affect, however, seemed tantamount to exercising behavioral surveillance over everything that their students did in an
unending set of judgments from which there seemed little escape (Foucault,
1977; Hargreaves, 1989).
Assessing the affective domain for many teachers entailed using checklists to assess things like body language, the amount of work produced, making positive comments to one's group partners, paying attention in class,
displaying positive attitudes toward the subject, completing homework, and
showing willingness to seek extra help from the teacher. If one student made
a "snarky"comment about another, the latter,though an exceptional student,
might be reclassified as one "who really understands the concepts well [but]
may have terrible cooperative team skills which would detract from his 'A'
grade."Some teachers kept things of this sort in mind to use when they made
more formal evaluations, or they put checkmarks in their markbooks to
record them. In one instance, it seemed that peer evaluation (which can be
extremely useful as an honest and valued form of feedback among students)
had degenerated into snitching and spying. One teacher reported what peer
evaluation in his case might involve:
Havingsomebody else look at the numberand say, "Whyare you
puttingdown 8 out of 10?I rememberthe times when you told soand-soto F- off.""Youknow, Mr.X, you didn'thearthat,so maybe
you should thinkaboutloweringthata bit."
Many of the affective attributesthat teachers assessed seemed to be synonyms for student compliance with the behavioral norms of schooling, not
behavior such as questioning, risk taking, assertiveness, initiative, or creativity that might serve students better in the world beyond school (despite
raising management problems for the teachers who taught them).
Few scholars have anticipated these political problems of contemporary
assessment better than the French social theorist Michel Foucault. According
to Foucault (1977), attitudes toward discipline and punishment today have
moved beyond vengeance and torture, or correction and incarceration,
toward successive or complementary forms of discipline. Discipline, Foucault argues, is now a finely graded, carefully regulated process of adminis85

trative control over body and mind where surveillance is perpetual and pervasive, intense and intrusive, continuous and remorseless in its application
and effects. Few processes, Foucault suggests, represent these principles
more clearly than the examination.
The examinationcombinesthe techniquesof an observinghierarchy
with those of a normalizingjudgment.It is a normalizinggaze, a surveillancethatmakes it possible to qualify,to classifyand to punish.
(p. 184)
With the advent of disciplinary methods, written description became "a
means of control and a method of domination, no longer a measurement for
future memory, but a document for possible use" (p. 191). In this particular
kind of case-record-based examination, each individual is made into a documented case, judged and compared as someone who may now, or at some
future unknown point, need to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, and so forth. This building of a dossier-of an extended case
record, to be retrieved and referred to at any future point-comes uncomfortably close to certain aspects of alternative assessment practice such as
continuous student assessment, self assessment, peer assessment, and portfolio assessment. These processes permit educational selection to be selfguided and failure to be disclosed gradually, in stages, as in the therapeutic,
ratherthan sudden and shocking, disclosures about terminal illness that medical staff make to hospital patients (Hopfl & Linstead, 1993). Alternative
assessments can stage the gradual disclosure of failure as modern medicine
stages the disclosure of death.
Moreover, wide-ranging and unending alternative assessments can
embody panoptic principles of observation and monitoring. Panopticism is
a principle of discipline in which power is exercised through an all-seeing,
invisible observer. As a result, "the constant pressure acts even before the
offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Its strength is that it never
intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise" (p. 206). The
bleakest possible political scenario for systems of alternative assessment is
one approximating the "ideal"system of modern penal treatment described
by Foucault. Such a system, he argued,
would be an indefinitediscipline;an interrogationwithoutend, an
investigationthatwould be extendedwithoutlimitto a particularand
ever moreanalyticalobservation,a judgmentthatwould at the same
time be the constitutionof a file thatwas never closed. (p. 227)
Affect needs to be assessed thoughtfully and reflectively in schools if
it is to contribute to children's learning in a significant way and not merely
make the children easier to control. Teachers in our study occasionally
pointed out the importance of not assessing everything, or of not evaluating all of a child's portfolio. One teacher's story illustrated the limits she
86

felt it was important to establish to guard against the political risks of alternative assessment:
I have one littlegirl in my room [witha pronounceddisability].She
has had to deal with an awful lot in her life. But if you questionher
in the class in front of the other kids-Oh, how can I marka kid
I refuseto do that.WhereasI have other
like thatin communication?
kids, it is a personalitything. I'm not here to change a kid's personality.I will coax it along or I will tryto develop it in certainways,
but that is all!
Postmodem
Perspectives
House's (1981) perspectives provide a set of classic lenses for understanding classroom assessment as it has been and is evolving. Since House set out
his three perspectives on educational innovation, our social and educational
worlds have changed dramatically. Many people in industrialized nations
now view themselves as living in a distinct, new social era. This era has been
variously labeled modernity (Giddens, 1990), postmodernity (Harvey, 1989;
Baumann, 1992), postindustrialism(Bell, 1976), postcapitalism(Drucker, 1992),
or the informational society (Castells, 1996).
The postmodern condition has begun to reshape public education and
the agenda for educational change. Three issues are particularlyrelevant to
the discussion of assessment reform. The first concerns the impact of complexity, diversity, and uncertainty. The electronically generated profusion
and confusion of knowledge and information is challenging assumptions
about what is most essential to teach. At the same time, the growing cultural
diversity of many student populations is challenging the established canons
of Western knowledge and belief that have underpinned the curriculum. As
a result, schooling has been assailed by disputes and uncertainties between
multiculturalists and creationists, colonialists and post-colonialists, promoters of multiple intelligences and defenders of traditional standards of content. Sometimes, and in some places, governments have rolled with and even
embraced these uncertainties and complexities, valuing multiple intelligences, diverse learning (and teaching) styles, and a process-based and integrated rather than content-based and specialized curriculum.At other times,
governments have countered the spread of uncertainties with an emphatic
assertion and imposition of false certaintiesof their own, pandering to parents'
nostalgia for the kinds of schooling they think they remember (Hargreaves, in
press) and taking refuge in "proceduralillusions of effectiveness" (Bishop &
Mulford, 1996) that standardized tests and other technical certainties reassuringly provide. Contradictory assessment imperatives are, in this respect, at
least partly a postmodern phenomenon.
The second issue concerns the impact of electronically stimulated and
simulated images and appearances on the core work of education and educational change. The existence and expansion of new technologies drive peo87

pie's ideas of what skills children should learn (e.g., computer literacy); how
teaching and learning should be reorganized (computers integratedinto classrooms, schools without walls); how learning can best be represented (multiple formats, different fonts, slick designs); and how systems of assessment,
accountability, and administration can be integrated and accessed technologically within common or interconnected systems of information. At the
same time, the intrusion of market-choice principles into public education has
led parents to act increasingly like fragmented individual consumers. In a
world of great uncertainty,with reduced attention to contributing to the public good of all society's children, they feel they can at least provide the best
for their own children. In this supermarket of schooling, how the products
and processes of education are designed and packaged is crucial. How learning, schools, results, and report cards look matters for the credibility and very
survival of many schools, as parents are able and often incited to choose
between them. Image appears to be everything.
The third issue is the impact of postmodern influences on children, turning them into strangers in many of their teachers' classrooms. Schools cater
to children living postmodern lives. Family structures are more complicated
(Elkind, 1997). Who the "real"family or parents of children are is often not
the least bit clear. What a family truly is any more is no longer a singular or
self-evident matter. Intelligence is no longer seen as singular, fixed, or predictable. In culturallydiverse classrooms, how children learn, think, feel, and
believe is acknowledged as being complex and cannot be taken for granted.
What is importantor real to children today, in their world of CDs, MTV,walkmen and discmen, computers and videogames and multichannel TV, is also
complex and constantly changing. Children may interact multiculturally in
their classrooms but associate with their own ethnocultural group in the
school cafeteria, shifting their allegiances and identities from one situation
to the next (Ryan, 1995). "Students,"teachers say, "have changed." They no
longer seem knowable or predictable. Many teachers today feel that they
have aliens in their classrooms (Bigum, Fitzclarence, Green, & Kenway,
1994). What does all this mean for assessment reform in the postmodern age?
What issues can a postmodern perspective on alternative assessment highlight that older perspectives do not?
A postmodern perspective on alternative assessment is based on the
view that in today's complex and uncertain world, human beings are not
completely knowable. No assessment process or system can therefore be
fully comprehensive. "Authenticity"has been paraded as a solution to the
problems of assessment, but the meanings and the existential experiences
we describe as authentic are fundamentally questionable. This section challenges and critiques the previous three, widely held perspectives on alternative classroom assessment. It does so largely not by describing new data
from our study (although we do some of this), but by reflecting critically on
the interpretationsthat we have presented so far, to deepen the criticalanalysis of alternative classroom assessment more generally.
The postmodern perspective challenges the very concept of authentic
assessment. Webster's dictionary defines authenticity as "the quality of being
88

authoritative, valid, true, real or genuine and "bona fide." Several definitions
of "authentic"are offered-all of them problematic when applied to education and assessment in a postmoder paradigm.
One meaning of "authentic"is that it "stresses fidelity to actuality and
fact" and "is not contradicted by evidence," yet in the postmodern age, singular and unquestioned views of reality and fact are being deposed by
multiple perspectives grounded in culturally diverse viewpoints. Alternative
assessment may be diverse, wide-ranging, negotiated, inclusive, and multifaceted, but this is precisely why it cannot be "authentic"in this first sense
of the term.
A second meaning of "authentic,"according to Webster's dictionary, is
applicable where an authentic phenomenon proceeds "indisputably... from
a given source that is avowed or implied."Yet in a postmodern world of uncertain and contested knowledge, the very idea of indisputability of source or
origin is untenable. Music, literature,and fashion freely recycle, blend, and synthesize styles, genres, and motifs from different cultures, formats, and periods
as in Cuban jazz, Afro-Celt, or techno-pop. In education, computer technology, e-mail, and the Internet make it possible for students to engage in cybercheating from students in other schools or from commercial sites such as "The
Evil House of Cheat"(Hargreaves, in press). This gives students the power to
cull instant information from multiple sources at the click of a mouse or to
download pictures and pie charts ratherthan develop the skills of compiling
data and representing them through their own creative ingenuity. In the age of
electronic education it is more difficultto discern if students'work is their own,
to determine whether the sources from which their work draws are reputable,
and to decide if these things matter.In the postmodern paradigm,assessments
clearly cannot be authentic in the sense of having indisputable origins.
In a third definition, Webster's describes authenticityas "close conformity
to an original:accuratelyand satisfyinglyreproducing essential features,"as in
a portrait.This is close to Wiggins's (1989) definition of authentic assessment
as repeating and simulatingthe core tasks and criteriafor performersin a given
field. Yet alternative assessments are less similar to "realistic"photographs or
"faithful"portraits than are cubist paintings-representing and interpreting
ratherthan reproducing reality from multiple angles and perspectives.
Last, "authentic"can, in Webster's terms, mean possessing "complete
sincerity without feigning or hypocrisy." Yet the postmodern world of simulation is one where illusion is widespread and acceptable, where new jeans
are faded to look old, modern buildings are given traditional facades, and
fake rocks adorn the spectacular atriums of Las Vegas hotels because they
look more real than real ones (Ritzer, 1998). In the postmodern world, image
often supersedes reality and becomes increasingly indistinguishable from it
(Baudrillard, 1990). "Authentic"assessments simulate reality as much as they
create it, producing beautiful "fakes"of grown-up book publications, theatrical performances, or artistic portfolios, for example.
Perhaps few things are more contrived and less authentic than authentic
assessment, where there is a constant sorting, sifting, and reflecting on one's
89

achievements in a portfolio, assessing one's peers using complex grids of criteria,or engaging in stage-managed three-way interviews with parents and students. Littlecould be more artificialor manufacturedthan this. In the face of
complex postmoder assessment technology, an old-fashioned gut response
of "B+,could do better"startsto seem much more authentic and sincere.
In her dissection of authenticity and educational change, urban school
principal Debbie Meier (1998) cuts to the chase when she says,
Artificialitydoesn't have to be a bad word, and authenticityisn't a
guaranteeof good education.Playingscales on the piano over and
but so is the piano and what we do on it.
over is surely "artificial"
Whetherit's justifieddepends both on how much we value its end
purposeand whetherwe concludeit'sa good routetowardreaching
such an end. (p. 596)
The truth is that schools, with their corridors, blackboards, desks, and
lockers, are highly artificial places. As an organization, what really should
matter is that learning and its assessment are purposeful and engaging for
students. "Much of what passes for authentic curriculum and authentic
assessment in the jargon of contemporary pedagogy," says Meier, "seems to
miss this point by giving in to the search for entertainment and avoidance
of boredom rather than in pursuit of clear purposes and powerful learning"
(p. 598).
The most formidable critique of the idea of authenticity in the postmodern perspective, however, is not just that it is difficult to achieve in postmodern times. Rather,the celebration of "authenticity"is itself a postmodern
phenomenon. In his analysis of post-emotional society, Skjepan Mestrovic
(1997) argues that postmodern society is characterized by a manufacturing,
even a McDonaldization of people's emotions, where we are taught how and
what to feel in a Disneyesque culture of "niceness." Post-emotional society
is, in this sense, one of "artificiallycontrived authenticity"(p. 80). In a world
where designer fashions are labeled "authentic"and Coca Cola is "the real
thing," achieving authenticity becomes an emotional symbol, suggesting that
in the face of increasing inequalities, mounting violence, and rampant individualism, at least our consumer purchases and lifestyle choices can make
us feel more authentic, less fake, and more real. The danger of making
"authentic assessment" into a "holy grail" of educational change is that it
might well contribute to and become part of this wider discursive, rhetorical
distortion, promising "feel good" improvement and empowerment in a world
where poverty and inequity continue to rise.
What are some of the dangers to be vigilant about here? Sophisticated
forms of representing learning for some educators can amount to little more
than slick images and superficial appearances to others. Alternative assessments, especially portfolio assessments, can simulate rather than stimulate
achievement. Students and teachers can be seduced into valuing form over
substance, image over reality, with glossy covers, elegant fonts, and a sprin90

kling of multicolored graphs and flow-charts masking mediocre content and
analysis. Portfolios may become devices to drive and define students'
achievement, so that students perform community service or extracurricular
activities not because of their moral value but because they want to have the
right kind of curriculum vitae or portfolio. In these ways, portfolio and performance assessments can easily trivialize and diminish the substance of
learning, reducing it to surface appearances.
Various kinds of self-assessment can draw students into processes of
inner exploration that amount to psycho-communicative excess (Denzin,
1984). In the name of self-reflexiveness, which Giddens (1995) describes as
characterizing the postmoder age, self-assessment might actually cultivate
an inwardly narcissistic, self-indulgent, and self-centered personality by making it into an endless, obsessive object of reflection and re-presentation(Lasch,
1990). As with the classic narcissisticpersonality, individuals who are engaged
in continuous self-reflection can become "boundless selves" (Hargreaves,
1994) who learn no limits to their own egos and desires and overestimate their
ability to transformthe world. Thus, in the absence of honest criticism,young
people may be induced to parade their psyches in public, irrespective of the
quality or worth of their achievements.
In his study of the implementation of portfolio assessment in an elementary school and its district, Nespor (1997) shows how teachers used the
complex signs and representations of portfolio assessment to avoid or
obscure grading hierarchies. Teachers, in other words, used the discourse of
portfolios to connect themselves to other members of their profession rather
than to communicate clearly with the parents of the students they were supposed to serve. The parents (especially the working-class parents) were all
too aware that the later stages of schooling and adult life beyond were differentiated and unequal, and this made them rightly anxious for "objective"
scores and grades that showed where their children stood (so that they could
take corrective action, if necessary).
Alternatively, in positive terms, a postmodern assessment practice can
offer multiple representations of students' learning in ways that give maximum voice and visibility to their diverse activities and accomplishments.
In this sense, a postmodern system of alternative assessment comprises
multiple forms of representation of students' achievement through written,
numerical, oral, visual, technological, or dramatic media that are collected
in a diverse portfolio of activity and achievement. Hierarchical distinctions
of worth between these different forms of representation are diminished or
eliminated, so that the achievements of students from visually oriented cultures, for example, are not systematically devalued in comparison with the
achievements of students whose forte is more in the areas of writing or
arithmetic. This allows students' work to be seen through multiple perspectives and allows the complexity of their abilities and identities to be
acknowledged more readily. The empowering nature of this process is
revealed in the following quotes:
91

I said to them a littledifferentsomethingtoday.... "Insteadof refiling yourportfolio,I want you to keep it. I want you to look through
it. I want you to make a statementin frontof the whole class about
how you feel aboutit at thisstagein the gameandthe reasonforyour
feeling, if you can say that."And they all go, "Ohplease Miss,don't
makeus say that."Anywaythey did it. One kid said to me in frontof
the class, "Youknow Mrs.Woods, my whole life I thoughtI know
I'mnot very smart;I'mnot very academicand thereforeI thoughtI
wasn'tverygood at verymanythings."Butthen he looks in the portfolio and even though he's still not very academic,there'sso many
thingsthathe is good at.
extra-curricular
The kids have a cross-curricular,
portfoliothat
is ... equal between academicskills, personalmanagementskills,
and teamworkskills. Once a week the kids administertheirportfolios. They put in a piece or they writeabout an event or an activity.
They have to reflecton the skills.
Such a postmoder system of alternativeassessment involves the students'
voices in the process of assessment (as we outlined earlier) and in determining how the products of assessment might be compiled and used. Such student involvement is not just an act of empowerment but is also a way for
teachers to acknowledge that they cannot fully know their students and may
not even begin to know them without having access to the self-understanding
of students themselves. As postmodern conditions have destabilized people's
beliefs in the capacity of experts to judge others with any certainty,other people's ideas about their own experience, their own health, or their own learning have begun to be treated more seriously. The struggle for knowledge
about students in postmodern times is no longer something that should
depend on the technical judgment or holistic insight of the teacher or of governments. Instead, communities of people should dialogue with students in
ongoing conversations about students' learning and achievement in relation to
a range of contents and with different purposes. Such conversations concentrate on multiple readings of students' work that might be represented by
business people judging science fairs; or by parents, teachers, and students
engaging in three-way interviews about student portfolios together on parents'
night; or by employers, media representatives, and community members discussing and developing their own accountabilityindicators (instead of simply
applying other people's) (Earl& LeMahieu,1997).
Conclusion
Each of these perspectives on alternative assessment reform points to
opportunities to make assessment, learning, and teaching more technologically sophisticated, more critical and empowering, more collaborative and
reflective, than they have ever been. Each also highlights the risks that alternative classroom assessment might extend into apparently endless surveillance, degenerate into narcissistic self-indulgence, or crowd out deeper
learning and classroom caring. Choosing the positive over the negative sce92

narios should not be left to hope or fate. Rather, by drawing thoughtfully and
critically from all four perspectives, we should and can exercise greater vigilance in pursuit of educational values that will move alternative assessment
reform in educationally rigorous, equitable, and sustainable directions.
Note
We have chosen "postmoderity" as the best descriptorbecause, in our view, the
widespread impact of computerizationand informationtechnologies on all areas of culture and society marks a decisive break from any preceding period in history for economic, political, and social life and, indeed, for everyday experience. Because many
elements of industrialismhave been retainedand because in some countries, computerization has been used to revolutionize industrialproduction ratherthan develop services
and other kinds of activityoutside the industrialsphere, postindustrialismis not an appropriate term (Castells, 1996). Postcapitalismis an equally unsatisfactorydescriptor,since
formercommunistcountriesare also capturedand transformedby the new economic and
informationaldevelopments.
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Author(s): Andy Hargreaves, Lorna Earl, Michele Schmidt

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Hargreaves, Earl, and Schmidt