Policy and the standards debate: mapping changes in assessment in mathematics

ABSTRACT

The influences on governments for policy changes in schools range across many agencies, including the political party in power. When policies change, the sources of these influences are not always clear. The project whose work is presented in this special issue examines what these changes look like in terms of the differences in assessment tasks of school pupils’ mathematics, over time. In this article we attempt to develop a graph, which we argue will have general applicability internationally, that can help to reveal the sources and nature of those influences. We construct the graph in interaction with an examination of the most recent changes in two countries. We argue that our analysis is a necessary complement to the project’s findings in that it enables us to identify the fields of recontextualisation, their relative strengths in terms of influence and hence conjecture their impact on the mathematics curriculum.

KEYWORDS:

• mathematics education
• policy
• curriculum

Notes

1. “Bernstein’s concept of field is similar to that proposed by Bourdieu (1992, p. 17); namely, a social space of conflict and competition, an arena ‘in which participants vie to establish monopoly over the species of capital effective in it … and the power to decree the hierarchy and ‘conversion rates’ between all forms of authority in the field of power’. In the course of struggles, the very shape and social divisions of the field becomes a central stake, because alterations to the relative worth and distribution of resources equate to modifications of the structure of the field (i.e. the social division of labour and the social relations within the field)” (Singh, 2002, p. 573).

2. Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) was the overarching ‘theory’ on which post-apartheid curriculum policy was based. In broad terms OBE curricula are organized around outcomes (goals), with little specification of the content and methods to achieve these.

3. It is worth pointing our here that at least one of the educational researchers on the review committee draws on Basil Bernstein’s sociology and is particularly concerned with weakly classified and framed curricula and the effects on inequality.