Belfast, Northern Ireland

10–12 November 2011

Assessment and opportunity to learn

Theme

At the core of every assessment system or practice is the impact assessment has on learners.  The assessment instruments, the nature of assessment – formative and summative – and the data yielded by assessments contribute to students' opportunities to learn. As history shows, much assessment practice has been underpinned by theories of psychometrics and its associated disciplines, especially psychology, but more recently attention has turned to the impact of assessment on the test taker and its influence on future learning opportunities.  Together with psychometrics and psychology, disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and childhood studies provide a rich context in which to consider assessment and its interaction with learning.

The importance of assessment to learning is of interest to policy makers who see assessment as a means of changing classroom practice. Governments and practitioners use assessment data to plan future learning opportunities. It is crucial, therefore, that researchers in the field of assessment, test developers and educational practitioners understand fully the context in which they work and the theoretical foundations on which their work is based. 

The AEA-Europe annual conference in Belfast provided opportunities for policy makers, researchers, test developers and practitioners to explore comprehensively from the viewpoints of different disciplines a range of themes and contexts related to assessment and opportunities to learn:

• The benefits and disadvantages of current practices in educational assessment and their impact on learning;
• The learning opportunities afforded to students and their impact on assessment outcomes;
• The current state of the field of assessment (both research and practice), how it evolves and adapts to ever-changing educational policies and the learning needs of students;
• The use made of assessment data in the development of educational policy and practice and the provision of greater opportunities to learn;
• Policies and practices which promote new thinking in the philosophies underpinning assessment, and the barriers to  introducing these;
• Ways in which assessment research and practice can be developed to accommodate the real life experiences of students;
• New ways of approaching research to aid policy development and implementation;
• The benefits and limitations of psychometrics as applied to educational assessment to improve opportunities to learn;
• The contribution of the social science and humanities traditions to educational assessment;
• Technological changes in assessment and their interaction with opportunities to learn.