Content area
Full text
Abstract. In 2010-2012 the new assessment system was officially introduced into Estonian formal education. In order to understand how fundamental a cultural change this was for Estonian society, this study presents the discourses represented in the memoirs of the former students who got their assessment experience between the 1960s and the 1980s. The official Soviet assessment system was introduced into Estonian education in the 1950s. Although the Estonian pedagogical literature in the 1960s - 1980s was pedagogically comprehensive, the 48 recollections gathered for this study repeatedly represented discourses that can be found from the assessment norms introduced in the 1950s: counting mistakes, public humiliation, teacher's injustice or assessment that was meant to punish for improper behaviour.
Keywords: assessment discourse, Soviet school, Estonia, thematic case - narratives, recollections
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3176/tr.2017A02
1. Introduction
Assessment in formal education could be approached as a tool that would support learning but also as an indicator of the evaluation and motivation culture in a certain society. School in societies plays a central role in socialization throughout childhood and adolescence and therefore establishes the key norms and values of the specific culture (Holodynski and Kronast 2009). While formal education reflects, moulds and communicates certain values (Berry 2011), the assessment one experiences influences his/her perception of the feedback on one's achievements or behaviour. The predominant assessment paradigm in the Western world has shifted from assessment of subject content to assessment of a_student's learning (Stiggins 2005). The movement started in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the push for formative as opposed to summative evaluation (Bloom, Hastings, and Madaus 1971, Burns 2002).
The paper seeks to reveal the scope and nature of change that the new assessment system brought along to Estonian culture in 2010-2012 in comparison to the assessment ideology embedded into the Soviet education. For this purpose, 48 short thematic retrospective narratives of former students, currently middleaged, were analysed and compared to the discourses presented in Soviet decrees on assessment. It is important to note that the substantial turn in assessment did not officially take place during the political transition in the 1990s, but later. Only in 2010-2012, when the new National Curriculum was launched and adapted, schools and teachers had to turn from summative to formative assessment. This change...