Teachers’ professional judgement in assessment: a cognitive act and a socially situated practice

Abstract

This paper presents a study of teachers’ professional judgement in the area of summative assessment. It adopts a situated perspective on assessment practices in classroom and school settings. The study is based on interviews with 10 sixth-grade teachers and on the assessment documents they used when determining end-of-term grades in students’ report cards. The main findings from qualitative data analysis highlight both the individual cognitive and the socially situated aspects of teachers’ judgements. The findings are discussed with respect to three levels of teacher judgement and the implications for activities of social moderation.

Keywords:

• teacher judgement
• summative assessment
• socially situated practice
• grading in primary school
• social moderation

Acknowledgements

The study presented here was carried out by a team that included Linda Allal, Jamila Dorner, Lucie Mottier Lopez, Walther Tessaro, Edith Wegmuller (University of Geneva), Filippo Cattafi, Ariane Favre Marmet, Jean-Marc Hohl and Bernard Reidweg (Assessment Unit, Department of Primary Education, Geneva). We sincerely thank the teachers who participated in the study and the school system for allocating two half-days of release time to each teacher.

Notes

1. Differentiated equity has as its goal to promote learning and achievement at the highest possible level by all students. It can include elements of standardisation (e.g. all students take the same classroom tests under the same conditions), but uses qualitatively different sources of information that are appropriate for understanding and supporting each student’s learning trajectory. In the French-language world of education, this conception has its roots in the work of the sociologist Bourdieu (1966) who wrote (our translation): ‘ … by treating all learners, however unequal they may in fact be, as equal in rights and duties, the school system is led in fact to give its sanction to initial inequalities with respect to the culture [of schooling] … Formal equality that regulates pedagogical practice serves in fact to mask and justify indifference regarding real inequalities with respect to schooling and the culture taught… ’ (336–7).