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Abstract
This paper focuses on formative assessment in the field of higher education. It examines Bernstein’s work on vertical discourses and knowledge structures with the view to deepening understanding of the concept of assessment for learning. The first part of the paper draws on Vygotsky’s work on concept development and Bernstein’s work on knowledge structures to explain why ‘generalisation’ and ‘hierarchy’ are central in knowledge acquisition. It then explores Bernstein’s claim that, within the vertical discourse, different knowledge structures (hierarchical and horizontal) afford greater or lesser visibility of their epistemic structure, and thus of their evaluation criteria of what counts as a legitimate text. The second part of the paper investigates the ways epistemic expectations are signalled through the practice of evaluation to first‐year university students in a professional education course and proposes that markers do not offer students stuffiest access to recognition rules necessary for producing legitimate texts in the future. Drawing on Maton’s distinction between semantic gravity and semantic density, the paper offers an example of how markers could recast what is present in students’ work to offer students access to key ordering principles in vertical discourses.
Notes
1. Bernstein (Citation2000) distinguishes between ‘recognition rules’ that refer to the student’s ability to classify legitimate meanings – that is, to know what meanings fall outside a theoretical model and what may/may not be put together – and ‘realisation rules’ that refer to the acquirer’s ability to produce/enact what counts a legitimate text (2000, 16 and 209).
2. This notion was developed by Bernstein (Citation1990, 18) to code the form (elaborated and restricted) accessible to children of different social class, its origin in the social division of labour and its affect on acquisition of school knowledge.
3. In first edition of Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identify, Bernstein provides a fascinating analysis of Bourdieu’s limited use of the symbolic to convey the arbitrary (socially constructed) base of knowledge. He argues that sociologists need to investigate the structuring significance of the internal structure of symbolic systems (Citation1996, 170).
4. Muller defines these characteristic of knowledge as ‘verticality’ and ‘grammaticality’, respectively (Citation2006, 13). ‘Verticality’ refers to the elaborated structure of integration and subsumption of propositions into high‐order ones. This is similar to Vygotsky’s ‘system of generalisation’. ‘Grammaticality’ refers to the strength of the conceptual syntax of a language in relation to the empirical world. The stronger it is (Bernstein uses the notion of ‘rigorous restriction’; Citation2000, 163), the more stable are its referents.
5. In the field of the social sciences and the humanities (horizontal knowledge structure), intellectuals dispute not only each other’s assumptions about what concepts (such as ‘learning’, ‘class’, ‘liberal economy’, etc.) mean, but also the epistemic means that generate claims about how are these related to specific empirical phenomena.
6. In sociology it refers to different sociological approaches – functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and so forth, constitute different languages. See Bernstein (Citation1996, 181 n4). Other examples are the feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, post‐structuralist, and so on, approaches that form the field of ‘cultural studies’.
7. This, ironically, is experienced more by the senior holders of the language. Senior speakers of a language, Bernstein argues, ‘may be cut off from acquiring the new language because of trained incapacity arising out of previous language acquisition …’ (Citation2000, 162).
8. Maton and Muller explain this complication: ‘alternative theories are in a war of hearts and minds, and choices between competing claims to insight are based more on a “knower code”, that is to say, on who is making knowledge claims rather than on what is being claimed and how’ (Citation2007, 27).
9. Bernstein explains: ‘The acquirer rarely has access to the transmitter(s) recontextualizing principle but this principle is tacitly transmitted and is invisibly active in the acquirer as his/her “gaze” which enables the acquirer metaphorically to look at (recognise) and regard, and evaluate (realise) the phenomena of legitimate concern’ (Citation2000, 173 10n).
10. Bernstein summarises: … The recognition and construction of legitimate text in a Hierarchical Knowledge Structure is much less problematic, much less a tacit process than is the case of a Horizontal Knowledge Structure, particularly those with weak grammars. In the latter case what counts in the end is the specialised language, its position, its perspective, the acquirer’s “gaze”, rather than any one exemplary theory …’ (Citation2000, 165)
11. In ‘summarising descriptions, the locus of evaluation is a particular discursive text or an authentic experience and perception.
12. Bernstein argues that pedagogical modes are influenced by social facts and are not intrinsic to the discourse of knowledge (Citation2000, 34). In other words, there is no guarantee that practitioners in the fields of hierarchical knowledge structure will use visible pedagogy and evaluation, because the epistemic means of their knowledge form are capable of integration and subsumption. The use of problem‐based learning in medical education is evidence of that.
13. Questions may be raised about the quality of the question. This is beyond the scope of the present paper.
14. Context could be a specific material context or a particular ideological view.
15. ‘Value’ is particularly important for evaluative feedback in horizontal knowledge structures, which are rift apart by ideological revolutions (Maton and Muller Citation2007).
16. ∼ signifies ‘relation between’.
17. Words taken from the segment are italicised.
18. This problem is compounded in higher education. Unlike schooling in which evaluative criteria can be transmitted on an ongoing basis during classroom interaction through classroom exercises and tests, practitioners in academic contexts normally foreground the practice of knowledge production over and above the practice of knowledge transmission evaluation. Lecture halls are big and impersonal, evaluation is far less frequent, and opportunities for ongoing feedback are radically curtailed.