Stephen Mazepa

In an academic venue, student learning and assessment occur as an ongoing dialectical process. To the degree that students internalize this process is the degree to which they are actively involved in their learning. Benchmarks and learning targets are useful when viewed longitudinally through the curriculum. When assessment procedures match both their intended learning targets and the pedagogical methodology, which is being tested as much as student achievement, the results are both valid and reliable. Within the social constructivist paradigm of teaching and learning, such a task has particular challenges associated with it. The milestones we know from our longitudinal view as measurable targets are scaffolds for future curriculum. The result of today’s assessment is the indicator of tomorrow’s prior knowledge.

Or is it? That long view of curriculum is only meaningful to the teacher and a few highly involved learners. When teachers manage to make classroom lessons meaningful to the majority of students, learning targets become part of daily classroom discourse. They cultivate a culture of assessment where students self- (and other) -assess as part of their learning tasks (Stiggins, 2001, p. 47). Meaningful learning is most often born and nurtured in a social context, both as the retention of necessary data and as the internalization of necessary cognitive processes. How can we assess individual student learning when the learning itself was reliant upon and founded within a social context? If "the test" and nearly as often, the "studying for ‘the test’" is done completely outside the context in which the learning was founded, under what pretenses can one call the results, valid or reliable? How about fair? These questions are the ideal prompts for our ensuing discussion of Epistemic Game Theory (Collins A., & Ferguson R., 1993) and its applicability as an assessment model within a sociocultural context of learning.

This paper suggests an approach toward assessment based on a principle from sociocultural theory known as "mediated agency". The premise is that the primacy of mental constructs lies within the social sphere of "intermental" processes whereby those constructs are then "appropriated" by the individual as "intramental" processes.

Teachers who are astute to the many "mediational means" by which students appropriate new knowledge and skills must remember the dialogical context in which they were presented. In siting a study by Palinscar (1987), Forman et. al. challenges conventional wisdom with respect to common assessment practices.