Donald E. Scott – författare

This book provides pragmatic strategies and models for student assessment and ameliorates the heightened sense of confusion that too many educators and leaders experience around the complexities associated with assessment. In particular, it offers guidance to school and district personnel charged with fair and appropriate assessment of students who represent a wide variety of abilities and cultures. Chapters focus on issues that directly impact the educational lives of teachers, students, parents, and caregivers. Importantly, the confluence of assessment practices and community expectations also are highlighted.

Assessment is highly politicised in contemporary society and this book will both confirm and challenge readers’ beliefs and practices. Indeed, discerning readers will understand that the chapters offer them a bridge from many established assessment paradigms to pragmatic, ethical solutions that align with current expectations for schools and districts.

In Part One, readers engage with concepts and skills needed by school learning leaders to guide optimal assessment practices. Part Two delves into student assessment within and across disciplines. Part Three provides pragmatic approaches that address assessment in the context of inclusive intercultural education, pluralism, and globalisation.

This book provides key insights into how educational leaders can successfully navigate the turbulence of political debate surrounding leading student assessment and professionalised practice. Given the highly politicised nature of assessment, it addresses leaders and aspiring leaders who are open to being challenged, willing to explore controversy, and capable of engaging in informed critical discourse.

The book presents the macro concepts that these audiences must have to guide optimal assessment policy and practice. Collectively, the chapters highlight important assessment purposes and models, including intended and unintended effects of assessment in a globalised context.

The book provides opportunities to explore cultural similarities and particularities. It invites readers to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about ourselves and colleagues in other settings. The chapters highlight the cultural clashes that may occur when cross-cultural borrowing of assessment strategies, policies, and tools takes place. However, authors also encourage sophisticated critical analyses of potential lessons that may be drawn from other contexts and systems.

Readers will encounter challenges from authors to deconstruct their assessment values, beliefs, and preconceptions. Indeed, one purpose of the book is to destabilise certainties about assessment that prevail and to embrace the assessment possibilities that can emerge from cognitive dissonance.