Assessing Learning for Sustainable Development: Curriculum Reform, High Stakes Assessment, Global Indicators and Real Facts

This paper addresses a central dilemma for education and sustainable development. The question is how should curricula change to support sustainable development and what would new learning outcomes look like? Education for... [ view full abstract ]

This paper addresses a central dilemma for education and sustainable development. The question is how should curricula change to support sustainable development and what would new learning outcomes look like? Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aspires to transform the content and cognitive outcomes of learning to promote the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that make it more likely that humanity prospers rather than perishes. Fundamental shifts are needed in understanding and behaviour to balance development gains in the present against their costs for the future. This is the simplest way of defining a new agenda for education and development.

Assessment is core since it defines valid knowledge and generally does not reward outcomes that promote the knowledge, skills and attitudes associated with sustainable development. Most high stakes selection examinations are based on curricula and cognitive outcomes linked to traditional school subjects that have not been shaped by concerns for sustainability. Assessment systems in the minds of many parents and students are a competition for selection that values educational achievement as a personal positional good, rather than a social public good.  Few attempts are made to assess the kind of problem solving skills that promotes bio-diversity, encourages carbon neutral economic growth, and reduces social conflict. Nor is it common to promote attitudes that protect future consumption of valued goods and services - e.g. national parks, clean air, fish stocks, wellbeing - by discounting the present against the future rather than discounting the future against the present.

This paper opens a debate to address the silences about what should now go into the 15,000 hours of school that the SDGs anticipate? What would constitute an education fit for purpose in the 21st century that is different to that of the (unsustainable) 20th century? If learning is now to be prioritised under the SDGs this must mean far more than the assessment of familiar learning outcomes linked to 20^th century curricula designed to maximise discrimination between candidates for high stakes selection. How can the reform of systems of assessment support curriculum led changes that promote new and different aims and objectives related to sustainable development? How can assessment highlight the dangerous fallacies that lie behind the fashion for alternative facts that threaten sustainable development?