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“Very Sad, But It Works”: One Pupil's Assessment Career in Religious Education

Article  in  Religion and Education · January 2013

DOI: 10.1080/15507394.2013.745360

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“Very sad, but it works”: one pupil’s assessment career in religious
education

Nigel Fancourt, University of Oxford

Abstract

This article combines two under-researched issues: the role and effect of assessment in
religious education; the effect of assessment regimes on the construction of learner
identities. It describes the context to assessment in English religious education. Then
generic arguments about summative and formative assessment are reviewed, and the
notion of ‘assessment careers’ is introduced. The practitioner research methodology is
described, before analyzing the data from one pupil, which shows how he combined
elements of two types of learner identity, including the ability to reflect on wide aspects
of his learning in religious education. The implications for conceptualizing learner
identities and for assessment in religious education are considered.

Keywords: Assessment, assessment career, learner identity, religious education

Introduction

Religious education in England is a discrete school subject, such as mathematics or

history. However, if a subject is part of the curriculum it is inevitably drawn into wider
aspects of education. Assessment is a vital aspect of this, covering the various processes
of marking, testing and evaluation. Pupils are often given marks, grades or levels. These
are fed back to parents in reports. Pupils also sit formal examinations and receive
accreditation, usually at particular stages in their schooling. The results of these heavily

1
determine pupils’ educational progress and life opportunities thereafter. It is almost
impossible to imagine education without it.

As religious education in England is within the curriculum, it is inevitably bound

up in assessment. The vast majority of pupils undertake a non-confessional study of
several major world religions, seen as vital for living together within a religiously diverse
society1; assessment plays a part in this. From Year 1 to Year 9 (aged 5 to 14), most
schools use a set of nine ‘levels’; a set of hierarchically organised generic criteria, which
cover both factual understanding of different religions (‘learning about religion’) as well
as pupils’ ability to evaluate and reflect on this, akin to argumentation and self-expression
in English (‘learning from religion’)2. Work is often given specific ‘levels’, which are
often further subdivided into three, e.g. 3c. In Year 11, aged 16, pupils sit public
examinations (the General Certificate in Secondary Education), graded A* to G, with C
as the recognised ‘pass’ grade; for many, this includes religious education. But is all this
assessment positive? Some argue that its development in religious education over recent
years has been beneficial, both in motivating pupils and raising teaching standards3.
Others argue that religious education has ‘fallen victim to a technicist and standards-
related political ideology of education'4. The stakes are high because what one sees as
hugely beneficial, another sees as poisonously harmful.

Challenging the ascendancy of summative assessment

Religious education is not alone in this debate. There is widespread concern about the
value of certain types of assessment. There is a particular desire to develop forms of
assessment that aid pupils’ learning, which has been spurred on by the identification of
two assessment ‘paradigms’5. The first is summative assessment, also called ‘assessment
of learning’; this is a concern with the measurement of attainment, notably in public
examinations. It can also apply to the use of tests in schools, and the giving of grades,
marks or levels on a piece of work. In some educational systems, almost all assessment,
including classroom assessment, takes this form, in marked tests. By contrast, formative
assessment or ‘assessment for learning’ is aimed at helping the pupil’s educational

2
progress. It is associated with feedback, and particularly feed-forward. Assessment for
learning can be seen as focused on learning, rather than on measuring. There has been a
groundswell of interest in identifying and refining this approach. In 1998, Black and
Wiliam produced a landmark review of over two hundred pieces of research6. This
showed that grading was over-emphasised and learning under-emphasised, which
encouraged competition between pupils, comparing grades, rather than the personal
improvement of each pupil. The effect of competition was implicitly to ‘teach’ the lower
attaining pupils that they lacked ability. Thus they became de-motivated and lost
confidence in their own capacity to learn7.

The last point highlights the effect of summative assessment on pupils’ self-
esteem and motivation. Much research has identified two broad patterns of self-belief
among students. One type is ego-focus, or what Dweck calls ‘helpless’8. Such pupils are
afraid of failure, dislike challenges and want to give ‘safe’ answers. This is because the
use of grades, marks or levels tends to encourage competition, or what is termed norm-
referencing. Some pupils, often the same ones across the curriculum, become doomed to
‘fail’ in comparison to their peers. Nevertheless, the distinction does not necessarily
coincide with exam success: many successful examination students are ego-focused,
attributing success to innate intelligence, not effort. They are however bewildered when
they confronted failure, attributing it to a lack of some quality – memory or intelligence.
Such pupils are not independent, reflective, ‘deep’ learners. Fear of failure often haunts
them.

By contrast, there are task-focused pupils: those with high self-esteem as learners
– what Dweck calls ‘mastery’9. These pupils are prepared to tackle challenges in
learning, make mistakes and take intellectual risks. Even comparatively ‘unsuccessful’
task-focused students could be positive about their education because they focused on
their own improvement, not their position in a competition. This is the preferred type of
learner, and unsurprisingly summative assessment seems to engender self-focused pupils,
while formative assessment seems to engender task-focused pupils. The issue is to use
assessment formatively, so that pupils are task-focused, but unfortunately many of their

3
experiences in school are of summative processes. Were pupils condemned to one
approach? In major quasi-experimental psychological studies, Butler showed that a
change in assessment strategies would make a significant difference; pupils would
respond differently. Pupils are not permanently either ego-focused or task-focused.
Moreover, by adopting formative techniques, the attainment of all pupils would
improve10. Their dispositions interact with their experiences. Champions of assessment
for learning, such as Black and Wiliam, argue that a change in the experiences of
assessment will lead to a change in their attitude.

What are the implications of this for English religious education? Although religious
education is compulsory, it is not a major part of the timetable - usually one lesson a
week. The subject will usually be subject to the school’s overall approach to assessment.
Pupils can struggle to make progress under these conditions, so strategies to motivate
them need to be taken seriously. However, none of the research reviewed in Black and
Wiliam’s papers had considered religious education. Indeed, the majority of it was drawn
from mathematics and science, which require different cognitive skills. By contrast, there
had been very little research on assessment in religious education. However, there
seemed to be a close parallel between self-assessment, as an important element in
assessment for learning, and the process of ‘learning from religion’, as the second of the
two attainment target in English religious education, mentioned above, in which pupils
evaluate and reflect on their own beliefs, traditions and values11. Although Jackson does
not explicitly focus on issues of assessment, this is possibly similar to the process of
reflexivity within the interpretive approach12. There is therefore the potential for doubly
effective learning if formative assessment and learning from religion could be harnessed,
as an alliance of two forms of pupil reflection.

Practitioner research methodology

This part-time doctoral research focused on assessment for learning in religious

education, particularly self-assessment, i.e. how pupils understood their own learning13.
However, it did not follow the common methodological pattern for studies of formative

4
assessment, which are quasi-experimental. It was designed as practitioner research that
drew on pupils’ views of pedagogy and assessment as a method of reflectively
monitoring and thereby improving curriculum practice14. It drew on the longstanding
tradition of ethnographic research at Warwick, obviously the work of Jackson and also
Nesbitt15, which had focused on pupils’ perceptions of learning in religious education. It
was particularly inspired methodologically by O’Grady’s action research on motivation
in religious education16.
More specifically, a practical concern for teachers is how pupils encounter and
confront different teaching or assessment strategies: pupils do not behave like units of
quantitative data. The large-scale quasi-experimental research described above shows the
overall patterns, but the smoothed numerical results mask the often bumpy ride that
teachers experience with individual pupils in getting them to adopt this new perspective.
This research focused on pupils as individual agents and seeks ‘interpretive validity’,
catching the meaning, interpretations, terms and intentions that situations and events have
for the participants17. Other research has considered the overall effects of assessment on
individual pupils; Filer and Pollard examine one child’s experiences of assessment
throughout primary school, showing how a child’s ‘failure’ is almost a social
consequence of the assessment processes18. Ecclestone and Pryor follow this, devising
the term ‘assessment career’ to describe the subjective longitudinal dynamic of a pupil’s
experiences of assessment. They point out that ‘little is known about the effects of
assessment and social processes in classrooms and at home on learners’ identity’19.
Pupils’ understanding of assessment will vary with their experiences, and so therefore
will their reactions to it; they are both affected by the conditions in which they find
themselves, but also able to make decisions about how to react to them. Ecclestone and
Pryor draw on Bourdieu’s sociological notion of habitus; the habitus is a set of durable
dispositions which cause individuals repeatedly to restructure their social world; our
social world is not governed by a set of mechanistic rules, but rather a set of strategies20.
Thus pupils become accustomed to responding to assessment processes in particular
ways: teachers and pupils can become locked into a series of mutually reinforcing
behaviours. What is then problematic is how pupils react when teachers alter these
processes. While the teacher may see this positively, the pupils may not know how to

5
react. In that case, they may still respond in an ego-focused way, and will have to
discover how to become task-focused. This change is not impossible, but it is not
automatic.

As practitioner research, the school – a non-selective mixed secondary school in a

small, affluent town in south-east Oxfordshire - was not freely selected: it was my school.
The pupil intake was almost completely white and few pupils frequently encountered
ethnic or religious diversity. The school was relatively successful in national
examinations; moreover, assessment for learning was an important part of the school’s
policy21. The research was conducted with Year 9 pupils (13-14 year olds), the main
research with a class of thirty mixed-ability pupils, fourteen boys and sixteen girls. One
boy was Arab Muslim, the only member of an ethnic minority in the class; a few pupils
were regular members of local churches, others were nominally Christian, agnostic or
atheist.

Four self-assessment techniques were applied within modules on: arguments for
the existence of God; Jewish and Christian understandings of the holocaust, especially
Yad Vashem; women in Islam, focusing on the banning of hijab in French schools.
Various techniques were adopted22. First, the lesson objective was made explicit at the
start of the lesson; this was usually identified as a skill in ‘learning from religion’, e.g.to
reflect on, consider, or evaluate. A plenary considered whether this had been met, using a
‘traffic-lighting’ system of red, orange and green for pupils to indicate increasing
confidence about attainment. Second, sheets detailing the objectives for the module in the
form of ‘can do’ statements were given to pupils, e.g. ‘I can describe Jewish responses to
the holocaust’. Pupils assessed their attainment and progress using ‘traffic lighting’ at the
start, middle and end of the module, reviewing all their work; intermittent traffic-lighting
meant that changes in values could be identified by pupils, e.g. ‘I am tolerant of different
people’s views’. Third, pupils were asked to use the national assessment level criteria23 to
assess their written work, and thereby identify what to do to improve it. Finally dialogue,
through group and class discussion, was used to explore progress and attainment,

6
including attitudes and values, e.g. ‘Has studying the role of hijab made you more
tolerant?’ Only the third technique used the national level descriptors.

In a pilot study, pupils were interviewed in four groups of four pupils after one
term. Group interviews were used to mitigate the effects of the dual role of teacher and
researcher, to incorporate a wider range of perspectives, and to stimulate discussion.
Pupils were selected to ensure a range of gender and attainment, taking care that
individuals would feel comfortable in the group, but also negotiated with other teachers
who allowed pupils to be interviewed during lesson time. The semi-structured interviews
had five sections: the term’s topics and lesson activities; pupils’ views of their progress;
changes in attitudes and values; pupils’ ability to self-assess their learning, including the
four techniques. However, the dynamic nature of group discussions meant that interviews
did not always adhere to this.

In the main research, this process was repeated thrice over the year, i.e. three
interviews with four groups. This was to gain a richer understanding of pupils’ views of
the different processes over time. It was also because other research suggested that pupils
needed considerable repeated experience of self-assessment in order to benefit from it24;
While the techniques and interviews were repeated, there was no series of action cycles,
because the techniques were not modified at any stage; the term ‘practitioner’ not ‘action’
research is therefore used 25. The transcriptions were analyzed using deductive and
grounded categories, i.e. some categories were determined by the research questions,
whereas others arose from the data26. To test the validity and reliability of the emerging
categories, an independent educational researcher re-coded a sample and the inter-rater
co-efficient (0.9) was high. Some of the main findings have been used to consider the
inter-relationship between pedagogy and assessment, notably reflection within religious
education and self-assessment as a form of assessment for learning. In particular, the term
reflexive self-assessment is coined to describe the overlap between Jackson’s interpretive
reflexivity with self-assessment27.

One pupil’s assessment career: grades and levels

7
 Rather than considering all the interviewees, this paper considers the data from
one pupil, in order to make sense of his assessment career. Kevin was relatively tall for
his age, feisty and a keen sports player, especially rugby; he was a strong and popular
member of the class, though noted for his temper. In terms of beliefs, he was agnostic.
Various ability tests suggested that his attainment in literacy, mathematics and science
was a little above average. His assessment career was successful so far, and he had
broadly succeeded by being ego-focused. Thus he saw it as the teacher’s job to give
marks:

You should mark it. You should decide what you think it would be

He also believed that getting low levels or marks would motivate him to improve.

I think if you gave me a level 2, it would make me want to do better, because

level 2 is pretty poor.

‘Petty poor’ is of course comparative, and he also claimed that this was ‘a competition’.

Thus he was, to some extent, succeeding for the ‘wrong’ reasons. However, consonant
with this norm-referenced approach was his lack of any sense of criteria, simply reverting
to banal generic features.

If it’s a good piece of work, normally you can tell…because you’ve spent a lot of
time and everything.

But not only was he using the levels for norm-referencing, he also wanted the teacher’s
external praise.

K: you almost want a good level to – make – the teacher pleased with you, well I
do

8
 Others: gasp
K: well I know it’s a bit sad, but I think if I get a good grade, they’ll be nice to me
[others: laughter] if you get a crappy grade then -
NF: they’ll be really horrid?
K: yeah…
NF: …so that’s important, because of what the teacher thinks?
K: yea, yea…I got it from playing sport. If you do your job, when you are playing
a match, if you do your bit for the team, the teacher will be pleased with you and
he’ll talk to you as if you’re an adult. If you’re playing football and in the game
you do nothing – they’ll be disappointed with you and they won’t talk to you as
they would have done if you’d played the game…I’ve sort of done it many times,
very sad, but it works.

Alongside this ego-centered approach, the last comment reveals a sense of frustration
with the process, but one that he feels constrained to follow: ‘very sad, but it works’. The
anxieties of being ego-focused also emerged when he recognized demotivating effect of
getting low levels:

It can make you do one of two things. It can make you want to work harder [or] it
can make you feel dumb because you don’t want to do any more work because
you know it will be the same standard.

This illustrates the ‘helpless’ pattern. Further, this process was linked to his image among
his peers. He did not like the process of applying levels to his own work because of the
social risks of getting it ‘wrong’.

K: if you give yourself a level that’s above, you might look a bit of an idiot…
NF:…if it’s below, then you are making yourself look stupid, but if it is above
you are making yourself look -
K: a big mouth.

9
This concern also led to him suggesting strategies to avoid having one’s work used as an
example for peer assessment.

It could also actually, er, make your work worse, because you would write a bad
bit of work so that [the teacher] wouldn’t show it to the class

Thus, an attempt by a teacher to introduce this strategy could fail because pupils
interpreted it in the light of their previous experiences. The fear of competition from a
norm-referenced, comparative approach means that pupils subvert formative strategies.

One pupil’s assessment career: comments and peer-assessment

However, he was also open to some formative strategies, being enthusiastic about getting
feedback as comments:

If, you’ve got comments, then job done.

Comments…because it helps you see what’s good in comparison – but with a

level, just to say this is a four, but yours is a level three…Whereas in a comment
like ‘he has got that, but I haven’t…but if I put that in, then it’ll be better’.

Nevertheless, he could be ambivalent about formative assessment, either because his

reasons seemed to mix task-focused thinking with ego-focused thinking, or because he
gave different responses at different interviews. He appeared to value peer-assessment as
a way of improving his performance:

If you look at someone else’s, you get an idea of what they are writing…if they
are getting good marks, better than you, you think “right, if they are doing it, if
they are getting better marks that me, I’m doing something wrong - and they are
doing something right”…you kind of take bits from theirs over to yours…and
then when you get sort of better.

10
However, the phrase ‘getting better marks than me’ suggests that he is thinking
competitively about the process. His own caution about deliberately not doing work well
so that it would not get chosen for peer assessment should also be borne in mind. He
rationalizes these formative techniques within his existing assessment career. It is fuzzily
at the same time both ego-focused (the competition, and fear of his own work being used)
and task-focused (improvement, not fixed ability).

By contrast, there were some activities that he was permanently opposed to throughout
the interviews, notably the use of a rapporteur to feedback to the class at the end of the
lesson on progress in the lesson. This activity was abandoned quite early on in the
research; the class treated it as the end of the lesson and simply packed their things away;
they felt that the lesson was over once the main tasks were completed. Kevin’s response
was probably partly due to the fact that he was one of those very few rapporteurs.

I didn’t like it…I don’t like speaking to groups of people

It is striking that yet again class socio-dynamics was of concern. Indeed, he recognized
that if there was a different class ethos, it could have been possible:

If we had started it in Year 7, then we would have found it much easier, but the
fact that it was started in Year 9, then it was a bit of a culture shock.

The phrase ‘culture shock’ is important; he recognizes that a culture had developed
within the class, which would be hard to change.

One pupil’s assessment career: religious education

Alongside this, he also reflected on his sense of progress in religious education. Kevin
explained how knowledge of different beliefs could help you formulate your own views.

11
 NF: does it make your views stronger? Does it make them more thought out?
K: well, it makes you think about them…which can make them stronger

He was also able to articulate a wider social understanding of the educational goals of the
subject, as a cultural awareness and respect.

It’s like the [bank] advert [a series in which business executives are seen
behaving inappropriately in different cultures]. Because they say, that they
understand different people, like in, is it Mexico?...It’s like that, you do it so you
can understand the beliefs around you. So you don’t do stuff that’ll upset them.
Like in the advert, there is the one who puts his feet on the table and it’s a real
insult.

Thus he had developed a coherent view of the goals of the subject. He emphasized the
value of the subject in developing tolerance and how his learning had helped this.

Doing discussions has made me think that it’s about people’s accounts, as well, so
I’m less intolerant

He also felt that this attitude had extended outside the classroom, when discussing the
work on hijab:

I believed [the module] helped. It made me feel more comfortable joining in a

conversation about it ‘cause I understand more about what’s going on. So did my
parents, talking about it, instead of me thinking, ‘what the hell are they on about?’
I could join in.

In these quotations, Kevin identifies particular learning activities, e.g. discussions, as

being pivotal. Apart from the fact that he was able to make this connection, what is also
striking is that while he was wary of many assessment processes that involved speaking
out or putting his work ‘on display’, he was nevertheless more than prepared to

12
contribute to and identify the benefits of speaking out in a different sort of classroom
process, and indeed to consider that the attributes that he developed are relevant both
inside and at home.

Kevin also recognized that this process would not be easy or automatic. In discussing the
ability to empathize, he emphasized the importance of volition and patience.

NF:…Generally there is a big discussion as to whether really you can put yourself
in someone else’s shoes, whether that’s really possible…
K: It depends how much work you put into it. If you just sit there thinking ‘I
don’t want to do it’ then you won’t…You’ve got to sit there thinking ‘I can do
this and I want to do this’, and as soon as you start thinking that, it will start
coming to you in time

In this respect, Kevin is very task-focused. He believes that effort and will enable him to
succeed, and he recognizes the need for patience. ‘Work’ is not a written task but a
mental activity.

Overall, Kevin presents a complex picture. He is both task-focused and ego-focused. He

worries about failure, and competition, but can appreciate the benefits of formative
processes, such as peer assessment and self-assessment. Strikingly he is both caught up in
the anxieties of testing, with a complex set of dispositions and strategies for dealing with
it, and simultaneously able to reflect quite profoundly on how his learning in religious
education is actually progressing. He not only craves his teacher’s praise and naively
judges effort by the time spent on a task, but also he thinks he has developed the ability to
join in more adult conversations and the will-power to empathize with those with very
different beliefs to his own: ‘very sad, but it works’ versus ‘it depends how much work
you put in’.

Conclusion

13
This article tackles two under-researched issues: the effect of assessment regimes on the
construction of learner identities; the role and effect of assessment in religious education.
By considering the ‘assessment career’ of one pupil in religious education, light has been
shed on both. Both religious education, as a subject, and formative assessment, as an
assessment paradigm, offer pupils different ways to reflect on their learning.
Understanding of pupils’ assessment careers is helpful in diagnosing both their reactions
to potential summative processes, as well as their potential for self-reflection. One can
see Kevin as conditioned by his experiences, but as reacting to them. This can be seen as
negative, in that many pupils will react in a ‘helpless’ way to their learning in religious
education, either doing their best to ‘succeed’ under this approach, or finding ways to
negate it. However, it also allows for teachers to be at least sanguine about pupils’
reactions. It explains why the teacher’s best intentions can be thwarted by pupils who can
be challenged by the demands to take more responsibility for their own learning.
Individual pupils’ reactions may be the result of long-term processes, which may help
explain why they are difficult to change, or the result of what is happening elsewhere in
their school life – secondary school pupils will be experiencing assessments with many
different teachers. The concept of an assessment career thus allows teachers both to work
within the findings of purely quantitative research, and to recognize how they must work
within the opportunities and limitations of their own school. Yet it also allows for
cautious optimism, in recognizing that pupils can reflect in new and complex ways if they
are given the opportunity. Some pupils and some classes will take to some techniques but
not to others, and they may take time to take effect.

Furthermore, the interplay of assessment and pedagogy in religious education is

underlined. In discussions about religious education, or the nature of teaching about
religions in public education, the effect of assessment processes on this learning are
rarely mentioned, e.g. in the REDCo survey of religion in education across Europe28, or
in Lester and Roberts’ description of the Modesto programme29. They focus on social
cohesion and civic values, such as tolerance and respect. In itself this is clearly not
wrong, yet assessment is central to schooling, and needs careful attention in curriculum
design. Routine assessment processes may hinder or support these wider pedagogical

14
intentions. This applies to policymakers, both in terms of the pedagogy of religious
education and of assessment processes. Moreover it applies to school teachers, who will
need to develop more nuanced ways of making practical sense of the fuzziness of pupils’
dispositions in attempting to nurture more positive identities in these pupils, both as
independent learners and as members of a religiously diverse society.

1
This is described in Robert Jackson and Kevin O’Grady. ‘Religion and Education in England: Social
Plurality, Civil Religion and Religious Education Pedagogy’, in Robert Jackson, Siebren Miedema,
Wolfgang Weisse and Jean-Paul Williame (eds.) Religion and Education in Europe: Developments,
Contexts and Debates, 181-202. Münster: Waxmann, 2007
2
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Religious Education: the non-statutory national framework
(London: QCA, 2004).
3
John Keast, ‘Issues in the Teaching of Religious Education: Assessing Achievement in RE from early years to
A level’, in L. Broadbent and A. Brown (eds.) Issues in Religious Education (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003),
56-70
4
Michael Grimmitt, ‘The Captivity and Liberation of Religious Education and the Meaning and Significance of
Pedagogy’ in M. Grimmitt (ed.), Pedagogies of Religious Education (Great Wakering: McCrimmonds, 2000),
7-23
5
Caroline Gipps Beyond Testing: Towards a Theory of Educational Assessment (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1994)
6
Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam ‘Assessment and classroom learning’ in Assessment in Education 1998, 5:1, 7-
74. 1998
7
Ibid. p 17-18
8
Ibid. p.7
9
Caroline Dweck, Self-Theories: their Role in Motivation, Personality and Development (London: Psychology
Press, 1999), p. 7
10
Ruth Butler ‘Task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation: effects of different feedback
conditions on motivational perceptions, interest and performance’ in Journal of Educational Psychology 1987,
79, 474-482, and Ruth Butler ‘Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation: the Effects of Task-Involving
and Ego-Involving Evaluation on Interest and Performance’ in British Journal of Educational Psychology 1988,
58, 1-14
11
See note 2
12
Robert Jackson Rethinking Religious Education and Plurality: Issues in Diversity and Pedagogy
(London: Routledge Falmer2004)

15
13
It was supervised between 2003 and 2008 by Prof. Robert Jackson and Dr Valerie Brooks, and kindly
funded by Culham Educational Trust
14
John Elliott, Action Research for Educational Change (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991)
15
See Robert Jackson, Religious education: an interpretive approach (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1997), notably chapter 5, pp95-120. Also, Eleanor Nesbitt ‘Bridging the gap between young people’s
experience of their religious traditions at home and school: the contribution of ethnographic research’, in
British journal of religious education,1998, 20:2, pp102-114
16
Kevin O’Grady ‘Motivation in Religious Education: A Collaborative Investigation with Year Eight
Pupils’ in British Journal of Religious Education, 2003, Vol. 25:3, 214-225
17
John Maxwell ‘Understanding and validity in qualitative research’ in Harvard Educational Review 1992,
62:3, 279-300
18
Ann Filer and Andrew Pollard The Social World of Pupil Assessment: the Processes and Contexts of
Primary Schooling (London and New York: Continuum, 2000)
19
Kathryn Ecclestone and John Pryor ‘“Learning careers” or “Assessment careers”? The impact of
assessment systems on learning’ in British Educational Research Journal 2003, 29:4, 471-488. p. 472. See
also Kathryn Ecclestone 'Commitment, compliance and comfort zones: the effects of formative assessment
on vocational education students' learning careers' in Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy &
Practice, 14:3, 315 – 333, 2007
20
Pierre Bourdieu Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)
[Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle, 1972], p. 72
21
The school is described in: Janet Looney and Dylan Wiliams ‘Implementing Formative Assessment in a
High Stakes Environment’, in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (ed.) Formative
Assessment: improving learning in secondary classrooms (Paris: OECD) 129-148
22
Paul Black, Christine Harrison, Clare Lee, Bethan Marshall and Dylan Wiliam Assessment for Learning:
Putting it into Practice (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003)
23
See note viii
24
David Fontana, D. and Miguel Fernandez ‘Improvements in mathematics performance as a consequence of
self-assessment in Portuguese primary school pupils’ in British Journal of Educational Psychology 1994, 64,
407-417
25
Anne Campbell, Olwen McNamara and Paul Gilroy, Practitioner Research and Professional
Development in Education (London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 2004)
26
Herbert Altricher, Peter Posch and Bridget Somekh, Teachers Investigate their Work: An Introduction to
the Methods of Action Research (London: Routledge, 1993)

27
These are discussed in Nigel Fancourt ‘“I’m less intolerant”: reflexive self-assessment in religious
education’, in British Journal of Religious Education, 2010 32:3, 291-306, and in Val Brooks and Nigel
Fancourt, ‘Is self-assessment in religious education unique?’, in British Journal of Religious Education
(forthcoming). A more general analysis of all the pupils is described in Nigel Fancourt, ‘Reflexive
assessment: The interpretive approach and classroom assessment’, in Julia Ipgrave, Robert Jackson and
Kevin O’Grady (eds.) Religious Education Research through a Community of Practice (Münster:
Waxmann, 2009)

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This was the subject of a special edition of this journal: ‘The Comparative Study of Religion and
Education in Europe and Beyond: Contributions of the REDCo Project’, Vol. 38, No.2, 2010
29
Emile Lester and Patrick Roberts, How teaching world religions brought a truce to the culture wars in
Modesto, California, British Journal of Religious Education, , Vol. 31, No. 3. 187-200, 2010

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