Philosophical Tensions Associated with Educational Assessment

In this chapter, I review some existing philosophical perspectives on educational assessment, with a focus on critically evaluating the views of various philosophers of education on the concepts of validity and reliability. I then draw upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analysis of rule following in his later philosophy to argue that there are philosophical tensions associated with using one-off high stakes tests to assess students’ academic capabilities and to predict future outcomes. I also make the point that these issues are exacerbated by the difficulties pertaining to the reliable assessment of higher level cognitive skills. Finally, I suggest that some of these philosophical tensions could be potentially alleviated by replacing one-off high stakes tests by a temporally extended system of continuous assessment, which could offer the prospect of fairer inferences being made about students’ academic capabilities. However, I also caution against relying solely on the results of assessments of academic capabilities to predict students’ future outcomes.