title: Residues of historical examination practices? An inquiry into assessment in teacher education programs in Trinidad and Tobago
Creators: name: Farrell, Veronica
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2022

description: Abstract Proponents of alternative assessment in education built on the formative principle envision its possibilities for enhancing learning experiences and producing regenerative outcomes. The implication is that forms regarded as traditional are antithetical to education ideals upheld in the discursive community. Arguments that I have encountered in academic literature indicate that despite paradigmatic shifts in the re-conceptualization of assessment approaches, traditional elements have a tenacious presence. This displaces the potential of practices that could capture and develop more important learning processes and goals. This study was guided by consideration that assessment is a mechanism of the hidden curriculum, defined as contradictory, unplanned and unacknowledged dimensions of formal education. This hidden curriculum is linked with historically conditioned practices having an underlying chord of the regulative and punitive, agreed by many in the scholarly community to be inimical to education in its purest sense. The study holds that teacher education is a site where transformation in educational assessment could be researched, given the expectation that it is within higher education that progressive education ideals can be propagated. This is an exploratory study of teacher education in higher education institutions in Trinidad and Tobago. It employed critical discourse analysis of institutional documents to infer connections between textual conventions in institutional documents and the doings of assessment. I undertook critique of teacher educator stances and pedagogical reasoning in published research to triangulate these inferences. To offer complex insights from students of these programs, I re-storied the experiences they shared through semi-structured interviews. This arts-based approach was inspired by animal metaphor in folktales such as Ananse stories. Narrative hermeneutic methodology informed close reading and commentary of the meanings these stories carried about how assessment was received and experienced. From my exploration of the texts and narrated experiences, it appeared that the idea of prospective and practicing teachers being knowledge builders was not prominent. My analysis of questions posed in summative examinations from one site revealed that learnable, pre-formed, memorized knowledge detached from context, as opposed to constructed and actionable knowledge, was predominantly required. The document detailing assessment requirements from the second site evinced educator propensity to require convergent, atomistic, technicist knowledge and skills. From participant narratives I detected a pattern of normalization, compliance and being terrified while undergoing school-like, docility inducing, assessment activities. This study is intended as constructive criticism to increase awareness of how assessment in teacher education should be re-formulated. Recommendations are for addressing and challenging the restrictions residing in institutional genres and taken for granted ways of doing assessment. The study promotes a critical orientation that could lead to liberation from a technicist assessment outlook; surrendering the inclination to impose power over students as subordinates; opening the educative space to freedom in thinking and practice; and educating teachers for developing enlightened and less detrimental ways in which to do assessment with the children they teach.