Values and Classroom Assesment

In this section I focus on forms of assessment that are designed, administered, and evaluated by teachers themselves. Although, as I mentioned earlier, I believe that all forms of assessment have moral meaning, assessments by teachers of their own students carry particular kinds of moral significance.

Assessment and the Teacher-Student Relation
However we evaluate our students, when we come to do so we are always and inevitably faced with an insurmountable moral problem. In all that I have read on testing and teaching, I have nowhere seen it better expressed than by Nel Noddings (1984). In the following passage she begins by reaffirming the paramount importance of the teacherstudent relation: Teaching involves two persons in a special relationship. Usually, there is a fairly well-defined “something” in which the two engage, but this is not always true. Sometimes teacher and student just explore. They explore something, of course, but this something is not always prespecified; nor need it remain constant or, for that matter, even lead somewhere definite. The essence is in the relationship. In the relationship, the teacher has become a duality; she shares the view of the objects under study with the student. Then suddenly, grindingly, she must wrench herself from the relationship and make her student into an object of scrutiny, (p. 195) This “grinding” quality of assessment practices is an unavoidable consequence of the teacher-student relation. If we were merely technicians conveying information, there would be no moral dimension to assessment. However, we are not, and this dimension 65 Values in English Language Teaching not only exists but is of central importance in our approach to assessment. As teachers, we wish to be supportive—to push our students, yes, but to do so in ways that make them feel challenged yet also free to fail without consequences. At the same time, the need to evaluate—which, as I argued in the preceding section, is also a moral imperative—not only does not promote that kind of relation but actively works against it. It is important to point out that this moral dilemma does not go away when teachers do not have control over the testing practices used in their classrooms. They still participate in the processes of evaluation; from the point of view of the teacher-student relation, the net result is the same: the “grinding” sensation described by Noddings. The only difference is that the teacher has not had a voice in determining what material counts as knowledge for the purposes of the examination. In the previous section, I mentioned several ways in which assessment procedures cannot help but influence the teacher-student relation. One other crucial aspect of this influence must be mentioned here: the question of trust. Implicit in a great many aspects of testing is a lack of trust toward students: Everything from seating patterns to the meticulously controlled matter of test security are established in ways that assume a default tendency to cheat on their part. Trust, in turn, is an implicit belief in the fundamental goodness of the other. Absence of trust, by the same token, indicates a lack of a belief in the other’s basic goodness. In our mechanisms of control we are passing moral judgment on our learners.