Gonzalez-Wegener, Xaviera; (2022) An exploration of summative classroom assessment practice at secondary schools in Chile from an inclusive perspective. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

This study emerged from my professional interest in the question: what needs to exist in summative classroom assessment practices to enable valid achievement for all learners? A theory-building methodology from the critical realism paradigm was used to develop an explanatory case study research. Using a combination of retroduction and retrodiction techniques, I examined what the essential conditions that interact in teachers’ interpretative argument are, and how they interplay with each other to enable or disable students’ achievement. Empirical qualitative data, gathered from interviews and observations, were interrogated in order to theorise how the generative mechanisms of numeracy achievement impairment emerge through a stratified reality in which the assumed mechanisms, events and experiences related to learners’ differences. The study proceeded through three key phases. The first stage involved a reflexive phase for me to step back from current approaches to what constitutes learners’ differences from contemporary white and grey literature, to develop my own emancipatory argument against over-simplistic knowledge. Then the key challenges facing educators in a mixed ability setting were considered in dynamic relation to their summative classroom assessment practices. From this reflection, I designed the data collection methods in a way in which participants could find by themselves how and why they make conclusions and decisions on diverse learners’ observed performance. Secondly, I gathered the data following hybrid methods for thematic analysis, which were analysed under abductive reasoning by theoretical redescription and contrasting causal components. And thirdly, I decided to go back to my participants in order to eliminate extraneous causal components that did not relate to the research question regarding the social phenomenon under scrutiny. The findings uncovered that teachers’ agency could actually challenge disabling policies about special educational needs and classroom assessment. However, unsuitable content in teachers’ education programmes about assessment, plus already published knowledge about assessment that totally lack rigorous frameworks, actually hinder summative classroom assessment that enables valid and reliable achievement for all learners. New insights emerged into the possible transfactual conditions that need to be present for teachers’ collective influence upon effective inclusive practice for all learners. The need to introduce formally taught components in teachers’ education that are adequate to their context, and compulsory continuous professional development for educators to uncover how their personal experiences influence their practices, and how to manage unconscious bias professionally, are recommended. In conclusion, this exploratory study aimed to develop a causal model of numeracy achievement impairment that was actually empirically developed. This model explains how and why ableism takes place in teachers’ summative classroom assessment practice, compromising the validity of assessment outcomes for all.

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