Assessment in 21st Century Learning: Improvisation and Inquiry

Introduction

The practice of literacy education is highly complex now that digital and social media have multiplied resources for meaning making in multimodal, multilinear, multi-player ways (Rowsell, 2016). As if that were not enough, the narrative driving 21^st century learning reform goes something like this: Much of what kids learn today will be irrelevant by 2050 (Harari, 2018). What literacies are needed for the fluid world of the 21^st century? And what practices of assessment will support what we don’t yet know?

Formative assessment aspires to be assessment for learning when teachers have a pedagogy of seeking out data to provide feedback to students and to plan instruction (James, 2017). Assessment for learning promised to improve achievement by using real-time evidence about rich learning opportunities, an educational holy grail offered as an alternative to the impoverishing effects of externally sourced, standardized assessments (Wiliam, 2017). In this approach to formative pedagogy, questions are a key source of data for teachers (Black & Wiliam, 2009; Heritage & Popham, 2013). However, assessment cannot be for learning if it is asking the wrong kinds of questions. As Delandshere (2002) points out, the first question to pose when seeking an answer to ‘what do students know?’ is what it means to learn.

Thought leaders of the 21^st century learning movement suggest that in an era of mass technological change and social disruption, students must develop cross-disciplinary competencies through inquiry-based learning so they can work critically, creatively, and collaboratively to solve complex problems (Fullan & Langworthy, 2013; OECD, n.d.). But the kinds of problems which matter, and what it means to be critical, to be creative, to work collaboratively, and to engage in inquiry, are open to question. For example, arts educator Margaret Latta and colleagues (Latta, Hanson, Ragoonaden, Briggs, & Middleton, 2017) studied how teachers enact cross-disciplinary learning in an education system undergoing 21^st century reform. In this work, the authors define ‘critical thinking’ as a competency for thinking creatively and rigorously. They discuss the need for open-ended inquiries which allow space and time for indeterminacy so that new forms of learning may emerge. The Organisation for Economic Development (OECD), on the other hand, has developed an assessment of ‘collaborative problem-solving’ which engages students with artificial intelligence to solve a science problem in a scripted computer simulation (Griffin, McGraw & Care, 2012; OECD, 2017).

But from the standpoint of literacy education, teachers may wonder if the shift to the language of 21^st century competencies is either an addendum to or a simplification of their already cross-disciplinary work. After all, in this study’s context of Ontario, Canada, the Language and Literacy Curriculum acknowledges that inquiry is at the core of all communication, and tasks teachers with developing competencies in literacy that will allow learners to work across subject disciplines (Ontario, 2006). Rather than beginning with assumptions about 21^st century learning, then, this research seeks a better understanding of how elementary teachers practice the complexities of literacy teaching and formative assessment in the 21^st century.