The Competence Debate Graduate Employability Regeneration e-skilling & cyberontology Live Working Papers Useful Links Emergent identity, education and distributed assessment: an ethnomethodological exploration Len Holmes, The Business School, University of North London (at time of presentation) Prepared for Ethnomethodology: A Critical Celebration conference, University of Essex, March 2002 Introduction The study of educational assessment is generally treated in either of two ways : psychological or sociological. Psychological treatments are essentially internally-oriented, mainly focus on issues concerning the validity and reliability of assessment regimes, and on the various aspects of those two key concepts. In line with the traditional and dominant empirical-realist orientation of scientific psychology, the emphasis is on discovering facts about students: as Rowntree(Rowntree 1977 ) puts it, to assess someone is "[to] some extent or other […] an attempt to know that person." (emphasis in original) Sociological studies tend to be concerned with the role of assessment (and certification) in the reproduction of societal structures. Again, this perspective tends to be one of fact-discovery: in this case, not facts about individual persons but of relationships between the education system and wider society. The aim of this paper is to explore assessment as fact-production, particularly as a distributed process extending across what might be termed the education- assessment-selection nexus. The focus here will be on higher-level education and employment, the arenas of higher education in relation to graduate employment and of professional and managerial education and development. The work of Hager and Butler (1996), on two models of assessment, as scientific-measurement and as judgement, will be examined from the perspective of ethnomethodology. Whilst their rejection of assessment as scientific-measurement will be shown to be supported from an ethnomethodological standpoint, the paper will argue that their alternative model is unsustainable. It will be argued that assessment should not be viewed in terms of the activities of individual assessors as 'lone agents' discovering 'facts' about students, but as a distributed process of 'fact production' concerned with issues of 'emergent identity'. Assessment: the scientific measurement vs judgemental models The fact-discovery perspective on assessment is evident in what Hager and Butler (Hager and Butler 1996) term the 'scientific measurement model' which, they assert, has been characteristic of traditional assessment practices. In contrast, they argue for a 'judgement model' which has emerged in the context of, and is more compatible with, recent educational innovations and initiatives, particularly those which are concerned with preparation for