Digital Disruption in Teaching and Testing

Assessments, Big Data, and the Transformation of Schooling

Claire Wyatt-Smith, Bob Lingard, Elizabeth Heck, Claire Wyatt-Smith, Bob Lingard, Elizabeth Heck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides a significant contribution to the increasing conversation concerning the place of big data in education. Offering a multidisciplinary approach with a diversity of perspectives from international scholars and industry experts, chapter authors engage in both research- and industry-informed discussions and analyses on the place of big data in education, particularly as it pertains to large-scale and ongoing assessment practices moving into the digital space. This volume offers an innovative, practical, and international view of the future of current opportunities and challenges in education and the place of assessment in this context.

1

Transforming Schooling through Digital Disruption

Big Data, Policy, Teaching, and Assessment ¹

Bob Lingard, Claire Wyatt-Smith and Elizabeth Heck

Big data and digital learning assessments… are part of the broader digital disruption brought about by enhanced computational and digital capacities, in terms of the volume, variety, and velocity of data that now circulate within countries and globally… Data are not inherently disruptive. It is the datafication of experience and the digitalization of data that are the source of disruption.

(Wyatt-Smith et al., 2019, p. 2)

Introduction

This introductory chapter highlights the major issues concerning digital disruption in teaching and learning in schooling, and implicitly in other educational institutions. We want to do more than simply document how digital disruption is playing out in contemporary schooling. The chapters in the collection provide insightful accounts of these matters and as such contribute to contemplating improved social futures. Our aim in this chapter, drawing on our different expertise, is to open up some normative questions about how the digital might productively be used to construct better and more equitable schooling for all. Of special interest is how the digital is reshaping what it now means to be learners, teachers, school leaders, and policymakers, with impact on the place and the roles of parents, caregivers, and communities. Related are significant issues around the rights of the child, privacy and confidentiality, ethics, and legal issues associated with data use and ownership, storage, curation, and purpose. These matters also have high relevance to teachers, parents/carers, and communities.

In editing this book, we conjoin our collective academic expertise in assessment and testing, education policy and governance, and the influence of the digital on how learning occurs. Bringing together these domains is a potent mix: policy shapes the possibilities for school and teacher practices and is currently being heavily affected by digital disruption. Within policy frames, educational assessment and testing decisions always affect the work of teachers, learners, and school communities. This is a reality that has been intensified by digital disruption. Adding to this are rapidly evolving digitally-based opportunities for young people’s learning, both in and out of school. Assessment has a particular salience in the work of schools as it is the main technology through which sorting and selection, linked to the provision of the opportunity function of modern schooling, are manifested. In these ways, assessment is intensely value-laden, and to ensure its perceived legitimacy, it must be seen to be valid, reliable, and fair.

Sometime ago, Bernstein (1971) wrote about the three message systems of schooling: curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation (including assessment and testing). We assert that today, given the predominance of test-based accountability in many systems throughout the globe, the “evaluation message system” steers schooling systems as meta-policy. Schooling systems today have invested heavily in data infrastructures to manage huge volumes of data, including about school and individual student performance. The restructuring of schooling systems through new public management, and subsequently through network governance, have enabled new non-state actors to be involved in the work of the state. In education, this has opened the space for edu-business, particularly EdTech companies, to be influential players in policy, the provision of data infrastructures, testing, and even curriculum (Ball, 2012). This involvement is driven by an overriding concern for profit, while it putatively offers the advantages of efficiency and dependability of testing, and a rapid return of results for use by “clients” in schools. These matters have been amplified in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

It is in this context and from our cross-disciplinary approach that we seek to precipitate ideas and challenges, looking to raise possibilities for more productive and educative uses of the affordances of digital technologies and data for policy, teaching, assessment, and learning. We thus seek to take stock of where these matters are at, while acknowledging that they defy stabilization. The book addresses the actual and appropriate affordances of digital technology in public policy, including education policy, and in relation to teacher professional practices. We problematize: appropriate human+machine relationships in the construction and production of data; appropriate policymaker and teacher interpretations and uses of data; and appropriate design and development of data infrastructures, including data interoperability. These are very important considerations as the digital is restructuring contemporary schooling systems and is radically reforming teaching and learning.

In what follows, we first briefly outline the broader backdrop and contexts to the concerns of the collection, followed by a brief account of the policy context that has enabled digital disruption in education, and then address the changing terrain of educational assessment. We then deal with digital disruption in and through evaluation, followed by consideration of this disruption in relation to big data. The subsequent section explores digital disruption in teaching. Summaries of the chapters in the collection, including a suite of provocations, are then presented prior to the summative conclusion of the chapter. The collection, in effect, offers the reader a contemporary pause and a moment to reflect at a critical juncture in human history on the future trans/formation of schooling and learning in respect of the affordances of the digital and of data.

Backdrop and Contexts

We are at a critical juncture in human and societal history. Some of the tried and tested approaches of the past may no longer be relevant. This also appears to be the case in schooling. Yet, while new technologies can offer potentially new and very positive opportunities for education, we argue strongly that schooling and teacher professional practices are intrinsically relational, contextual, and cultural in nature and work with an ethics of care (Noddings, 2003). Further, we argue that this ought to remain the case in the context of digital disruption. However, a thorough reconceptualization of the broadest purposes of education in schools and the wider society, including academic and social purposes, needs to be addressed and adopted. In this reconceptualized frame, new technologies should play a vital positive role in the future of schooling. In and of themselves, however, they are not the panacea. We are arguing here that the affordances of digital technologies ought to complement a new teacher professionalism. This involves inter alia reconceptualizing teacher evaluative expertise for discerning what data are useful and how they can be used to inform teaching and improve learning.

New thinking is required about the appropriate place of the range of new technologies, data infrastructures, new computational capacities, and software (for example, big data, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, machine learning, and individualization and personalization of learning trajectories). This is an acute need in respect of systemic policy and steering, educational leadership, teacher professional practice, including professional judgement, and student learning. These matters are undoubtedly not new in deserving attention, although they have come to the fore in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. These are the core considerations of this collection, Digital disruption in teaching and testing.

We note that these matters are pressing at a time of substantial social, political, and economic changes. They play out as growing inequality, political divides, economic uncertainty, mass global movements of people, greater population diversity, race riots, civic unrest, environmental risks and climate crises, health risks, rise of new nationalisms, and ethno-nationalism. These are all too familiar on our daily news platforms and show no signs of abating. Arguably they are intensifying. Perhaps paradoxically, the era is also characterized by “post-truth,” “fake news,” and “anti-science” tendencies (McIntyre, 2018) in the context of a seemingly new positivism in data-based public policymaking (Lather, 2013). All of this is occurring at a time of weakening of social cohesion and significant loss of public confidence in civic institutions and political processes, and even of democracy.

On the one hand, the new technologies could be deployed to ameliorate these conditions; on the other, they could exacerbate them. At the core of how these human futures will emerge is the key issue of appropriate human+machine interactions. We emphasize this point as we recognize that a technological and data juggernaut has been unleashed, is gaining significant power and influence, and is inexorably creating futures for us (rather than with us). In compiling this book, we adopt the position that, on a meta level, human ethics and values will be central to determining what sort of futures we create and the place of technologies in that future. These matters will affect the broad societal arrangement, but will also play out in education policy, curriculum choices, assessment, student learning, and in the work of schools and teachers.

For some time now the digital has been disrupting many aspects of contemporary social life. Many of these disruptive effects have been positive. Consider, for example, the affordances of new communication technologies (e.g., mobile phones), digital platforms (e.g., aspects of social media and virtual meeting spaces), and digital applications (generally referred to as “apps”). We also include much expanded computational capacity that enables the collection of unprecedented volumes of data, expanded analytic and predictive power, and the speed and efficiency of presenting new “useable” knowledge. In the early stages of digital disruption, there was a hope and aspiration that the new communication technologies would enable more democratic and inclusive participation and engagement in public and social life (Carpentier, 2009, 2011; Jenkins, 2006, 2009; Jenkins et al., 2013; Jenkins & Deuze, 2008; Zuboff, 2019). There is ample evidence that digital disruption has changed social interactions, in some cases profoundly. Yet there are downsides to these developments and less evidence of the democratic benefits.

Recent thinking has alerted us to how all of our online activity has been controlled by mega technology companies, and this datafication of human experience enables these companies to use this human data as a commodity to be traded and from which new profit is generated. This is what Zuboff (2019) refers to as “surveillance capitalism.”² We would also make the point that such surveillance techniques are utilized in market socialist countries, including the People’s Republic of China. Here the Social Credit System, introduced in 2020, utilizes the online participation of citizens to construct individual profiles, which are used then by both government and business to determine what citizens will be able to receive, and what opportunities will be opened up or closed down for them. This is a manifestation of what Deleuze (1992) called “control societies,” in which we are always subject to evaluations. The emergence of these societies might also be seen as part of what the German sociologist Mau (2019) called the “metric society” based on the quantification of the social. We would note that data from such surveillance have been “weaponized” and have become central to security concerns and potential risks to national governments.

While commercialization and profit are at play in digital disruption in the business sector, they are also evident today in education from the earliest years, and are equally applicable to privatizing (outsourcing, public–private partnerships) and network governed schooling systems. Network governance sees non-state actors involved in the policy work and delivery of the state, and these non-state actors include national and multinational edu-businesses, individual edupreneurs, and philanthropic organizations (Ball & Junemann, 2012). This, in turn, involves the provision of costly data infrastructures, hardware and software, evidence bases, and systems and processes for storing and analysis of a wide range of data. To this we add the design of computer adaptive testing (CAT); test data analysis at national, sub-national, regional, and international levels; and the publication of reports to governments, schools, teachers, parents, and students. The private sector has seen in digital developments a new opportunity to remake educati...