Optimising New Modes of Assessment: In Search of Qualities and Standards

French novelist Marcel Proust instructs us that, “a voyage of discovery consists, not of seeking new landscapes, but of seeing through new eyes.” Nowhere in the practice of education do we need to see through new eyes than in the domain of assessment. We have been trapped by our collective experiences to see a limited array of things to be assessed, a very few ways of assessing them, limited strategies for communicating results and inflexible roles of players in the assessment drama. This e...