Valid Assessment

This is a bit of a follow up to the post last week on the revision to qualifications in Scotland and was prompted by the announcement yesterday that SATs at 14 would be stopped in England. The report on the BBC news said that this meant that pupils would not receive any external assessment until they were 16. The implication was clearly that this was a bad thing.

As we have been grappling with implementing curriculum for excellence, the thorny issue of assessment continues to rear it's ugly head. Why is it that we are so obsessed by external assessment? Who says it's better than the teacher's judgement and why? Even teachers don't appear to want to trust their own judgement. The impression is that external assessment is good and internal assessment by teachers is untrustworthy, open to abuse and unreliable.

There must be a way of moving this debate on a bit from this point. I wonder how.