The impact of formal assessment procedures on teaching and learning in art and design in secondary schools

Background: The context for GCSE and changes over time

The introduction in the mid-1980s of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) marked the beginning of the 'reforms' that have continued unabated to the present time – not that the introduction of the GCSE was a rushed affair. The initial proposals to combine the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (GCE 'O' Level) and the Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) examinations dated back at least to the days of the Schools Council and Prime Minister James Callaghan's seminal lecture at Ruskin College Oxford in 1976. The new examination was aimed principally at the top 60 percentile of the 16+ ability range although, in the case of art and design, the range was often much wider.

The GCSE examinations were welcome and overdue, marking the end of the perceived need for many art teachers to 'double enter' more able students for both examinations. Moreover, the rationale for the introduction of the GCSE was clear enough: the GCE/CSE system was incompatible with comprehensive education and, according to Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools (HMI), work in secondary schools was dominated by examinations which, in their view, tended to govern the type and length of classroom activities. The reliability of inter-examination board standards then, as now, was considered questionable, so the new GCSE was administered by just four regional examining groups in England, one examination board in Northern Ireland and another in Wales. At the core of the proposals was the sensible aim to establish common national assessment criteria for all syllabuses and assessment procedures, to ensure that all syllabuses with the same subject title had sufficient content in common, and that all boards applied the same performance standards to the award of grades.

The members of the Secondary Examinations Council (SEC) GCSE Grade Criteria Working Party for Art & Design recognized that the key to the whole exercise was how to define candidates' achievements through explicit criteria while not overly restricting the methods by which they might be achieved. The working party accepted that this approach involved many compromises. These included tacit agreement that it simply may not be possible adequately or equally to assess all curriculum objectives because the evidence for some of them may be too ephemeral to be valid. Lengthy consideration of the aims of art and design subsequently expressed in the GCSE National Criteria led to the identification of three equally weighted, closely interdependent and interrelated domains:

* a Conceptual Domain concerned with the formation and development of ideas and concepts;

* a Productive Domain concerned with the abilities to select, control and use the formal and technical aspects of art and design in the realization of ideas, feelings and intentions; and

* a Critical and Contextual Domain concerned with those aspects of art and design which enable candidates to express ideas and insights which reflect a developing awareness of their own work and that of others.

Of course, this model is only one among many that could have been adopted and might have been equally coherent, but its conceptualization marked a significant step forward. As the working party struggled to develop the detailed criteria, a number of important issues emerged and significant lessons were learned. For example, the dangers of using adjectives such as 'simple' or 'sophisticated' in criterion statements because these kinds of words are ambiguous and open to diverse interpretations – a lesson that often has been overlooked in the interim as they increasingly find their way back into the assessment criteria lexicon.

In retrospect, the introduction of grade criteria was seminal in a number of ways. It can now be seen as the thin end of a wedge leading towards a state in which, as Eisner warns:

... infatuation with performance objectives, criterion referenced testing, competency based education, and the so-called basics lends itself to standardization, operationalism, and behaviorism, as the virtually exclusive concern of schooling. Such a focus is ... far too narrow and not in the best interests of students, teachers, or the society within which students live.

From the mid-1980s, through successive agencies such as the School Curriculum Development Committee (SCDC), the National Curriculum Council (NCC), the School Examinations Council (SEC), the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC), the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA), to the present Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), governments have sought once and for all to 'nail the jelly to the wall' through repeated attempts to define the content, aims, objectives, assessment parameters and criteria for all subjects, including art and design. But analysis of the documentation suggests that there has been little new thinking and in reality much of this relentless process has consisted of 're-packaging' (repeated editing and précis) of previous documents to make them fit the common template currently favoured for all curriculum subjects. Thus the publication of Curriculum 2000 and the latest specifications for qualifications give the impression that all questions about what constitutes good practice in schools have been resolved. However, history is likely to prove that this is just an illusion – before long another perceived change of circumstances or belated admission of inherent problems are likely to require a further round of tinkering and reductionism.

Orthodoxy

For many years concerns have been expressed about an increasing orthodoxy of approach in art and design education as a consequence of the examination system. As early as 1982, Eddie Price, an experienced chief examiner and chair of the Schools Council 16+ art sub committee, expressed concerns about the wash back of the examination system on classroom practice and prophesied problems with standardized assessment...