Assessment & curriculum

Assessment is the tail that wags the curriculum dog

Assessment is the tail that wags the curriculum dog

Introduction

Often we view assessment as something that follows learning that comes after instruction. However assessment commonly has a backwash effect on the curriculum and on the process of teaching and learning that go on within it. Any changes in educational assessment should, in this sense be planned in accordance with changes being proposed for curriculum. Curriculum and assessment reform should be undertaken together, with planned coherence (Tuttle, 2008, 137). Otherwise assessment reform will simply shape the curriculum by default. This paper is critical discussion on the topic.

Education system on Ireland

Ireland is a country in northwest Europe is part of the European Union (EU), its capital is Dublin. It is Ranked on14 in the PISA (Program Report for International Student Assessment) (The Women's Studies Association of Ireland, 2006, 3).

Historical Development of Assessment

Historical aspect of assessment is as important as it relates to the development and application of historical skills of children. The Assessmet of the educational process has had a series of background, that although they have evolved their original forms are preserved, but not with the same characteristics, together with the same techniques from the seventeenth and eighteenth assessment forms were oriented discipline of subjects, this mechanism of containment served to have effect the teaching through learning. In those centuries, classes are taught by instructors , who stood on a stool to control students who were sitting in the center of the stage to receive instructions. The rigorous discipline depended on the visibility that allowed the stool to monitor . During the eighteenth century after the Revolution Industrial, adopted a different form of architecture for the construction of schools, based on the model of Panopticon, much like a prison, in which a single observer, from a tower, could monitor a circle of cells without being seen by the prisoners (Department of Education and Science, 2002, 16). This new scheme was designed to establish schools for children of class half, but what changed was the architecture of the classroom, but the method of teaching remained the same,-the mutual teaching-disciplinary with the same characteristics. The working model with monitors, the design architecture and the organization of time remaining students in the school , was a system of observation hierarchical Foucault identifies it as a definitive techniques to carry out the disciplinary power.. This system of hierarchical observation gave rise to the different classifications of students, select according to their skills and behavior and to impose punishments and rewards.

However, there were educators like Robert Owen, Kay-Shutle Worth and David Stow, who criticized this educational model by considering that only produce docile bodies and individualistic and also because it departed entirely on the objectives of education, because they thought education should be carried out through understanding rather than memorization. With the emergence of the pedagogical ideas of prominent philosophers and educators such as Jean Jacques Rousseau , Immanuel Kant , John Henry Pestalozzi, among ...