How do teachers enact assessment policies as they navigate critical ethical incidents in digital spaces?

Abstract

Teachers are increasingly required to enact assessment policies in digitalised spaces, raising ethical issues of privacy and surveillance in the process. Yet, while policy enactment has been examined extensively, there remains research uncertainty around the ethical dimensions associated with assessment policy in digitalised settings. Drawing upon Ball et al.’s Typology of Policy Positions, and utilising Australian teachers’ interviews, we illustrate how the policy positions of the latter were shaped by critical ethical incidents in digitalised conditions. We describe how teachers struggled to reconcile their ethical obligation to provide valid assessment outcomes with their duty of care, procedural institutional commitments, and the need to protect student privacy. To ensure ‘ethical assessment’ practices that best fulfil their obligations, the educators were not confined to one policy position, rather they moved across roles, also framed as moral recuperation mechanisms. Regulations to help facilitate policy enactments of ‘ethical assessment’ in digitalised contexts are suggested.

Keywords:

• Policy enactment
• assessment
• ethical assessment
• critical ethical incidents
• datafied education
• digital technologies

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the Victorian Year 12 educators who generously gave of their time and openly shared with us their experiences. We would also like to thank the Faculty of Education at Monash University for the financial support (Globalization, Leadership & Policy grant, 2020) and Christine Grové for her comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 An estimate of the percentage of the population that one outperformed, namely, if one received an ATAR of 70, they performed better than 70 per cent of students that year. It is a number from 0 and 99.95 in intervals of 0.05. The highest rank is 99.95, the next highest 99.90, and so on. The lowest automatically reported rank is 30.00, with ranks below 30.00 being reported as ‘less than 30’.

2 The 2020 statement has since been removed from the VCAA website; however, the Authority has recently implemented the same policy (VCAA. 2021) and a similar policy was introduced in New South Wales (NSW Government 2021).