‘Doing the Best for the Students’: dilemmas and decisions in carrying out statutory assessment tasks

abstract

This paper considers the effects on teachers, students and the curriculum of the experience, in the spring of 1993, of the first extended assessement tasks in Design in Technology in England and Wales. It examines the frustrations experienced and the dilemmas faced by teachers in working on these tasks with students, and their attempts to resolve their resulting role conflicts. It is suggested, that in this case at least, teachers' loyalties to their ideas about good teaching and learning took precedence over the requirement to follow the Government's assessment procedures. This is because teachers felt that the tasks set by the Government were inappropriate both for student learning and for assessing the curriculum which they had followed, and that the ways in which they were expected to carry them out were detrimental both to student learning and to ‘fair’ assessment. It is suggested that in some cases this led to a ‘radicalisation’ of a comparatively conservative group. The effects on the curriculum, the schools and the teachers concerned are critically examined in the light of planned changes in the Design and Technology curriculum.