Editorial

The nature of the relationship between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment is a theme at the heart of this issue. The idea that curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are inter-related and enacted in harmony seems common sense. Sensible it may seem – but common it is not. Internationally, educational systems traditionally innovate as if these three major message systems (Bernstein, 1975) were independent of one another. Curriculum innovation pays little or no attention to assessment and vice versa whilst pedagogical innovation seems often planned in a curriculum and assessment-free environment. Yet, in schools and classrooms, teachers and pupils have to find a way to make sense of curriculum (what it is agreed should be learned), pedagogy (how best learning and teaching might take place for the very different learners within any classroom environment) and assessment (how learning might be discerned and future learning informed). If planners of innovation cannot conceptualise curriculum, pedagogy and assessment as a whole, then the task for teachers becomes ever increasingly complex as they try to impose coherence and meaning on misaligned systems. Some teachers continually try to help learners to make connections; others give up and talk of ‘getting through the curriculum’ or they employ pedagogical strategies for no reason other than they have been told to do so, or they assess because that is what teachers do – they ‘mark’ – with little thought to the impact of feedback on learning. Improving the alignment of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment is not peripheral to learning; it is core. For as long as we continue to treat it as at best desirable rather than essential, we will build in difficulties not only for learners and teachers but also for any government who intends seriously to enhance educational quality.

Research has a major role to play in helping to address issues of alignment, and the articles in this edition offer insights from researchers who are attempting to inform that process.

The opening article offers evidence emerging from a Norwegian Research Council project on how the inter-relationship of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in writing might be conceptualised. In the first of two articles in this edition from this project, the writers, Thygesen, Evensen, and Berge analyse their attempt to develop a ‘theoretically valid and coherent description and definition of writing’ (p. 172). They conceptualise writing as an act that brings together individual and cultural purposes. The researchers use this conceptualisation as the basis of a ‘wheel of writing’ which they develop as a model for the teaching of writing within and across subjects. They return to face a challenge that has remained intransigent for more than 40 years – how coherent curricular, pedagogical and assessment practices might be developed in language across the curriculum. The authors argue that the ‘wheel’ offers a model to support teachers in the development of writing by offering an interactive frame to explore the relationship between purposes and genres in writing. The ‘wheel’ can help stimulate a variety of teaching approaches to writing and can also act as a ‘tool for learning’ in subjects and across subject disciplines.

The idea of using assessment to enhance learning rather than simply as a means of judging and labelling learners has been the educational equivalent of the Holy Grail since the debate was reignited by the work of the Assessment Reform Group in the 1990s, culminating in the publication of the review they commissioned Black and Wiliam (1998) to undertake. Since then, and ever increasingly, the complexity of the apparently simple idea that assessment should support learning has been a major focus for the attention of assessment researchers. One of the most difficult issues in assessment for learning in practice has related to misalignment, what Marshall and Drummond (2006) referred to as the difference between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’ of assessment in action: a continuum between assessment for learning as an enactment of socio-cultural learning and as a series of pedagogical strategies only loosely related to curricular purpose or to learning. In the second article in this edition, Crichton and McDaid explore classroom perceptions of approaches commonly used under the banner of assessment for learning, in particular the way that the use of learning intentions (LIs) and success criteria (SC) is perceived by teachers and their pupils. The evidence emerging from the study demonstrates further, somewhat depressing evidence of a range of understandings amongst teachers about the connection between purpose and practice in pedagogy and assessment. Interestingly, the authors report that although some learners recognise the potential of these approaches to support their learning, the learners themselves are frustrated by their superficial implementation.

In the third article, Mannion and Mercer report on an empirical study carried out in a comprehensive secondary school in the South of England which attempted to introduce a whole-school, pedagogical innovation ‘Learning to Learn’. The innovation involved a team of teachers who designed and enacted the innovation with Key Stage 3 students based on a range of evidence-based practices. The article reports on the evaluation of the innovation at the end of the three-year period where the researchers found not only increased attainment amongst the young people involved in the innovation generally but also evidence of a significant closing of the attainment gap. The writers reflect on key features of the Learning to Learn approach adopted and conclude that the success of their approach lies in the combination of multiple effective practices. The evaluation of innovation is a crucial part of the process both for those involved to help them understand the impact of their own actions and for the system more generally to help build a deeper, collective understanding of what matters in effective change.

The challenge facing education systems concerned to promote high achievement for all citizens is further considered in the fourth article set in New Zealand. Although generally regarded as a high-performing education system, there is a persistent gap in achievement between students in New Zealand schools with high or low economic status, where in the latter Māori and Pasifika students are overrepresented. In this article, Wilson, Madjar and McNaughton report on an empirical study that explore the participation and achievement rates of secondary school students in selected literacy standards and included data from classroom observations to record practices and resources used in literacy teaching. The researchers identified significant differences between the opportunities to learn for Māori and Pasifika and other students from low Socioeconomic status (SES) communities and their classroom peers. These differences existed at both systems level and in classroom learning and teaching and raise a question about the extent to which the alignment of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment was different for different communities of learners.

The final two articles in this edition focus on assessment, often perceived to represent the most challenging of the message systems and the one likely to present the greatest difficulties in terms of alignment. The articles explore two very different assessment approaches. In the first, Hoadly and Muller make a case for standardised testing asking why it has attracted such bad press and why the pedagogical benefits that can be derived from tests have been downplayed. The researchers present responses from educators in South Africa to large-scale standardised tests and find both teachers and school managers to be ambivalent towards them. They suggest that it is not the test themselves that cause concern, as the tests have the potential to provide a useful source of pedagogic information for teachers who are test literate, but the accountability purposes for which tests are used that leave teachers and schools apprehensive.

In the final article, Thygesen, Evensen, Berge, Matre, and Solheim investigate the relationship between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment from a different perspective – the use of standards as a tool for teaching and assessing cross-curricular writing. The writers first explore the functional construct of writing that underlies summative and formative assessment of writing as a key competency in Norway and present the specific criteria being introduced in Norwegian teaching and assessment of writing. They argue that assessment criteria have such educational importance that their intellectual trajectories should be made explicit in educational research and demonstrate how national ‘norms of expected proficiency’ at grade levels, ‘standards’, have been grounded and developed through iterative interaction with experienced teachers of writing across the curriculum. Using ‘think aloud’ assessment interviews, pairs of teachers were asked to assess specific cases of students’ writings and make explicit their criteria for judgements. These transcripts were then interrogated by several other pairs of teachers to become ‘national standards’ to be tested in classroom contexts. This explicit attempt to draw together understandings of the curriculum with pedagogical approaches designed to engage those involved in the process of assessment may seem challenging but it offers the potential to build a better alignment and thus to avoid some of the later difficulties that undoubtedly emerge when less attention is paid to the inter-relationship of curriculum, assessment and pedagogy.

The recently published SAGE Handbook on Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment (Wyse, Hayward, & Pandya, 2016) concluded that four factors are crucial if curriculum innovation is to be sustainable. It has to be designed with pedagogy and assessment as integral to it. It has to emerge from the best evidence available in the area under consideration and on curriculum change processes. Those involved in the design and enactment of the innovation, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners need to be conscious of the impact, intended or otherwise, of proposed changes and plan to take account of these. Finally, systematic evaluation has to be built in from the beginning to explore emerging practice in schools and classrooms and to use that evidence to inform gradual changes to practice and to policy over a longer time frame. The articles in this edition contribute to a growing body of evidence to inform sustainable practices – a body of evidence to which attention must be paid if education is really to improve.

Finally, the Editors would like to thank Anna E. Du Plessis for the major review she has undertaken of The “Reason” of Schooling: Historicizing Curriculum Studies, Pedagogy, and Teacher Education, edited by Thomas Popkewitz.