Assessment and Paradigms

Introduction

There are various shifting educational trends in the assessment and evaluation literature (Trif, 2017): the challenge from traditional assessment to systemic overlapping between paradigms and assessment are going to be discussed in this chapter. Taking into account the variations of cognitive styles across students as well as the enormous interest to produce new paradigm it is necessary to contribute with clear guidelines corresponding to learning outcomes from contemporary school (Zajda, 2005). The study answers to the multiple combinations of polemics, noticing the fact that the assessment subject matter and topic has always aroused all education actors` interest, electors, press, psychologists and industry interest too. Rarely an education topic drew a large amount of financial support or succeeded to excite the society as, maybe, the most challenging debates and dilemmas were generated by the assessment researches. This is the reason why the mental of this field covers academic conventions, exciting editorials, tension, hermeneutics that are composed rigorously, problematic hypothesis regarding the future evolution of evaluation, empirical substantiation, business interests, alternatives for the specialized epistemology, eminently intellectual constructions, critical exegesis, etc. In other words, the measurement of excellence could be similar to a discursive mosaic which points out multiple worlds or academic markets. These also include periods of deep crisis, of progress, and uncertainty, all of these having eclectic emphasis dominated by honesty or promoting culture of resistance towards the assessment (Trif, 2018). This chapter analyzes the assessment paradigms linked with 21^st century transversal skills. The study aims to examine the narrative on assessment and to provide a meta-analysis of the literature in the fieldwork on how to measure the achievements. The qualitative investigation of the rhetoric on assessment is based on the multiple educational challenges from the authentic atmosphere of schools: in this case, shift from traditional tools to digital technology. This storm of knowledge from the assessment epistemology has impact on the educational paradigms.

In this multiform world of challenges, various discourses on assessment delineate considerable changes in epistemology and possible reconfigurations of paradigms. This reflects explicitly the interplay between assessment and paradigms, the multidimensional results of multifaceted analysis on the topic from different cultures and the preferences of various authors to investigate quality. There are involved some guidelines in order to design possible bridges between dissonances and controversies: theoretical framework, praxis continuum, axiological questioning and authenticity of assessment. This analysis indicates a dynamic rhetoric – combining sometime competing paradigms as being taught, learning on your own with guidance, provide instruction, teaching, produce learning, students as scholars, students as consumers, accountability paradigm, improvement paradigm, and so on – which can hardly be enclosed in only one movement, even if it is post-modernism, counter-modernism, opposite-modernism or the academic fashion after all these trends. It is, more likely, about a battle of the evaluation elites in order to assure a different future for children, based on the following categories of analysis: