Policy frameworks for new assessments

Abstract

Many nations around the world have undertaken wide-ranging reforms of curriculum, instruction, and assessment with the intention of better preparing all children for the higher educational demands of life and work in the twenty-first century. While large-scale testing systems in some countries emphasize multiple-choice items that evaluate recall and recognition of discrete facts, there is growing use in many countries of more sophisticated approaches. These approaches include not only more analytical selected response items, but also open-ended items and curriculum-embedded tasks that require students to analyze, apply knowledge, and communicate more extensively, both orally and in writing. A growing emphasis on project-based, inquiry-oriented learning has led to increasing prominence for school-based tasks in state and national systems, taking in research projects, science investigations, use of technology to access information and solve authentic problems, development of products, and presentations about these efforts. This chapter briefly describes the policy frameworks for assessment systems in Australia, Finland, Singapore, and the UK, with special attention given to identifying cases where assessment of twenty-first century skills has been or may be developed in assessment systems that report information at the national or state, as well as local, levels.