Reassessing educational assessment: how the way we talk about exams and grades exacerbates the problems of pressure, anxiety, and expectation.

Educational assessment is important. Yet it is easy to feel that schooling and other phases of education are shaped entirely by certain assessments and that assessment is only about exam results. The idea that grades can accurately describe the aims and outcomes of education is both reductive and pervasive. This book is about the stories we tell each other about educational assessment and how they impact public trust and confidence in educational assessment. It explains the roots and nature of assessment discourses and proposes a restructuring of the debate to rebuild public confidence. It aims to challenge dominant assessment discourses and demands a more nuanced, informed debate about what happens in and beyond schools, and how this influences public thinking. Using examples from international settings to explore the nature of trust in assessment discourses, this book shows how these discourses can be reframed so that all aspects of the assessment system—policymaking, school planning, home practice with students—can be delivered with confidence.