The neglected situation: assessment performance and interaction in context

Abstract

Informed by Goffman’s influential essay on ‘The neglected situation’ this paper examines the contextual and interactive dimensions of performance in large-scale educational assessments. The paper applies Goffman’s participation framework and associated theory in linguistic anthropology to examine how testing situations are framed and enacted as social occasions. It considers assessment as a shared focus of social activity, located in time and space, involving an assemblage of artefacts and actors. The paper presents ethnographic examples of adult literacy and numeracy assessment in Mongolia. The first part provides ethnographic description of a testing situation. The second part looks in detail at how linguistic interaction influences assessment performance.

Keywords:

• Goffman
• ethnography
• assessment
• interaction
• talk
• Mongolia

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the support of two anonymous referees, whose comments on the manuscript were much appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the work of Goffman see for example, G. Lemert and A. Branaman (Eds.), ‘The Goffman Reader’ (1997).

2. The concept of ‘inscription’ is taken from Latour and Woolgar (1979). In this case, it refers to the moment where assessment performance is converted into decontextualised binary code. The test in this sense can be viewed, following Latour and Woolgar, as an inscription device.

3. For a wider discussion of Conversation Analysis see Duranti (1997).

4. Latour (2005) acknowledges the influence of Goffman’s work, and suggests that he has not been sufficiently attentive to the role of material objects and the ‘entanglements of humans and non-humans’ (p. 84). This is a useful insight in terms of the role of material artefacts in assessment practice (e.g. computers, assessment booklets, manuals).

5. The notion of an institutionally configured respondent is borrowed from Woolgar’s (1990) essay on usability trials in computing.

6. Other than in Goffman’s work (e.g. Goffman, 1959), the theme of personae (or masks) is widely discussed in anthropological studies of personhood relating to categories of person.

7. Large-scale assessments usually collect some data on the testing situation – such as information about the setting and the presence and identity of bystanders. This provides scope for greater quantitative insights into the testing situation.

8. The reasons for the respondent skipping answers are not clear, i.e. we do not know if they are skipped because they are simply ‘too difficult’, or if skipping is the outcome of some ‘ecological’ dimension of the testing situation that is not relevant to the assessment.

9. The distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ in assessment is informed by the distinction used in linguistics by Chomsky, based on Saussaure’s contrast between langue and parole.

10. The assessment discussed in this paper took place in Mongolian. Transcripts were produced through simultaneous translation and subsequent discussion based on field-notes. For this reason, the paper does not include any detailed analysis of lexicon, prosody or semantic use of language. The translation was provided by research assistants, Ochirkhuyag Gankhuyag and Gansuk Suukhbaatar.

11. For a discussion of Goffman’s work within the wider field of linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis see Drew and Wootton (1988), Goffman and Heritage (1990), and Goodwin and Duranti (1992).

12. On evaluative assessments in linguistics see for example, Goodwin and Goodwin (1992).