Policy Legitimation of Educational Assessment Reforms: The Cases of Norway and Sweden

Abstract

This thesis investigates how policymakers engage in international research and policy discourses when legitimising nation-states’ educational assessments and testing policies, and examines the associated tensions related to the purposes of assessment. It proposes distinctions between assessments used to certify, govern and support learning and instruction and uses this analytical framework to investigate tensions between assessment purposes. The four articles explore: 1. the reform to the national curriculum and associated grading regulations in Norway; 2. the reform of age policies related to formal grading in Sweden; 3. the legitimation of the national testing programmes in Norway and Sweden; and 4. transnational trends and cultures of educational assessment. The conventional distinction between formative and summative assessment is exposed as being rhetorical and political rather than theoretical and practical, both in the contemporary Assessment for Learning policy and research discourses and in Michael Scriven’s original distinction, coined in relation to research on curriculum programme evaluation in the United States in 1967. Investigations into ongoing policymaking related to national testing and grading in Sweden illustrate principle problems associated with educational assessment. Increased emphasis on fairness can be related to politicians’ commitment to ensuring public confidence in the assessments. However, due to fundamental validity and reliability tensions, this promise can never be met. This constitutes a legitimacy crisis, which in turn is the driver of the use of policy borrowing to legitimise assessment reforms. The thesis illuminates how transnational trends related to meritocracy, accountability, and Assessment for Learning throughout the 20th century have shaped policy discourses and given rise to new modes of policy legitimation. One result of these transnational semantics of assessment reform is that the highly idiosyncratic reform representations are deepened continuously. Thus, while a shared language may present an attractive veneer for similarity across educational contexts, in fact, it erodes policymakers’ and researchers’ understanding of the investigated phenomenon.