Assessment and evaluation are crucial aspects of any educational system and rarely can they have been so central to
educational policy-making and the reform of schooling as at the present time. (The introduction of the National
Curriculum and Testing system in the UK and the test-based ‘No Child Left Behind’ legislation in the USA are but two
high-profile examples.) Assessment processes interact with curriculum and teaching methods to frame the student
experience of education, and the outcomes of assessment are crucially important in determining individual educational
progression and socio-economic futures. Equally, assessment is used by policy-makers to focus instruction on core
elements of educational provision, and the aggregate outcomes of assessment are employed to measure the quality
and effectiveness of an educational system. Good quality assessment is vital to individual student life-chances and to
issues of parental choice, school reputation, government policy evaluation, and long-term economic development.
Poor quality assessment can disrupt all of these elements of an effective school system by, for example, narrowing
what is taught and learned to only the limited range of skills and abilities examined through paper-and-pencil tests.
As serious thinking about and around assessment and evaluation continues to flourish and develop, this new title in
Routledge’s Major Themes in Education series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of
the subject’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Harry Torrance, a leading scholar
in the field, this Routledge Major Work is a four-volume collection of foundational and cutting-edge contributions.
The first of the four volumes (‘Assessment Policy and Practice’) examines the history and development of
assessment, including mental testing and testing for selection (e.g. IQ tests and the 11 in the UK). It brings together
key work on the debates about the formative and summative purposes of assessment (i.e. assessment to support the
learning process and assessment to measure educational outcomes); and the problems of assessing practical
competence. It also collects materials on recent developments in the use of assessment by policy-makers to drive
systemic changes in curriculum and teaching methods, including the development and use of international
comparisons of achievement.
The second volume (‘Assessment Issues’) covers the technical issues with respect to the validity and reliability of
assessment, including practical assessments, and research on how individual assessment items and instruments
(tests, projects etc.) and systemic structures and procedures should be designed to maximize validity and reliability.
The third volume (‘Curriculum, Programme and System Evaluation’) focuses on issues in, and the conduct of,
curriculum and programme evaluation. It gathers the most important thinking on the full range of evaluations
approaches and methods, including work on recent developments in audit and accountability mechanisms which seek
to evaluate the effectiveness of education systems as a whole, rather than at the level of individual programmes.
The final volume in the collection (‘Whither/Wither Assessment?’) collects the best materials on the current state of
contemporary practice, problems, and challenges for the future. Work brought together here suggests how
assessment could and should develop in the twenty-first century.
With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editor, which place the collected material in its
historical and intellectual context, this Routledge Major Work is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be
valued by specialists in assessment and evaluation and scholars working in related areas—as well as by educational
policy-makers and professionals—as a vital one-stop research tool.
