Assessing in the social domain : the whole-school assessment of practical and personal abilities

When it comes to the whole-school assessment of practical and personal abilities, can we and should we be assessing in the social domain? If so, what progress has been made in assessing social outcomes of schooling? There have been several attempts to expand the assessment of a range of educational outcomes in recent years, such as 'employability skills' in the vocational area. The author and a colleague, with funding from the Commonwealth Government, developed a whole-school assessment process on practical and personal social abilities. They undertook a trial of this process in 10 schools nationwide. To achieve the process a piece of software was designed which uploads the assessments that individual teachers make of their students on spreadsheets into a relational database. The results of the trial showed a significant degree of agreement between teachers of different parts of the curriculum in their assessments of the generic skills (eg oral expression, initiative, enterprise) of the same student. The trial also showed that teachers see and know a good deal more about students than is included in subject assessments, and that this understanding can be drawn on in a cross-curricular assessment.