Focusing on sustainable assessment in literature education

Description

Research has revealed the relations between paradigms of literature teaching, literary theory, assessment discourses, and students’ interest in reading literature. This presentation focus on theoretical aspects of literature education assessment and explores how assessment is present in Finnish literature curriculum. The aim of assessments in Finnish national core curricula for basic education is to support learning and to be an essential part of the learning process. Instead of testing and comparing students, assessments should guide and encourage students to learn. This reflects the Finnish approach to evaluation and assessment; Finland does not have strong top-down quality control mechanisms or national standardised tests. The shift from summative to formative assessment is apparent in Finnish education and highlights the meaning of assessment as supporting students’ learning processes. This generally means assessment for learning and assessment as learning. No explicit regulations, tools or methods for assessment are given in formal curricula. If the assessment orientation in the curriculum directs teachers to encourage students to learn, the learning assessment practices should also follow this lead. This is also present in the large-scale evaluation of basic education and general upper secondary education as well as the concept of curricular alignment (Atjonen et al., 2019). Still, national assessments of L1 shows that processes like remembering, knowing and analysing are the focus of these assessments. Other curricular aims highlighting socio-constructive learning, reading experiences, personal understanding of text and sharing thoughts and conversation with classmates are deficient. The assessment of literature education and teachers’ and students’ views on assessment has not been explored widely. However, the issue has been researched in second language (L2) and foreign language (FL) education (e.g., Bloemert et al., 2016). Prior FL and L2 research projects have highlighted questions regarding the curricular aims of literature education, the dilemma between assessment and testing cultures, tensions between assessment of learning and assessment for learning (e.g., Tsang & Paran, 2021). In addition, they have focused on methodological questions, for example, how to measure students’ personal experiences and understanding of literature reading. Our objective is to create a theoretical framework for sustainable assessment in literature education. Keywords: literature education, summative and formative assessment, socioconstructive principles

Period	16 Jun 2022
Event title	ARLE Conference: Transformations in L1 Education: Current Challenges and Future Possibilities
Event type	Conference
Conference number	13th
Location	Nicosia, CyprusShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International