This is a response to the text Capabilities for living and lifelong learning by Ally Bull (2015) which discusses the need to and the challenge of assessing the science capabilities. The text can be viewed here. Please be aware that I have highlighted sections and made my own notes on the text.
Assessing skills and knowledge is a relatively straightforward process. Our young people either can or can't recall information or reproduce a skill they have had exposure to. If only assessing a capability was that easy.
Throughout this text, I wasn't able to get away from the feeling that the way we assess learning is broken. The New Zealand Curriculum document is full of rhetoric about students leaving our schools with a set of capabilities to participate in society and yet we prioritise the assessment of very specific skills and sets of knowledge instead. For the most part, these capabilities have become idealogical rather than being viewed as concrete teaching points within our learning programmes because our assessment practices don't prioritise them.
But as we make progress towards making these capabilities a much greater priority (thank goodness!) the question of how to assess them becomes very challenging to answer. Assessing skills and knowledge using rubrics and matrices is easy because there is clear definition about exactly what a student should know or do. As Bull (2015) identifies, these kinds of assessment methods that use statements to represent 'levels' or 'stages' are too brief to capture the complexity of a capability. I would also question whether the development of capabilities is even a linear process. That would, of course, make linear forms of assessment impossible.
The only conclusion I can come to is that we need to get more creative about how we view assessment. There must a thorough, thoughtful and unique way to assess a capability - I just don't know it looks like yet.
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