Tracing learning outcomes across policy and practice (LOaPP)

When the Knowledge Promotion education reform was introduced in Norway 2006, the reform heralded a radical change in the Norwegian school. The reform entailed new elements such as competence goals and assessment. In the research project Learning Outcomes in Politics and Practice, we have studied how this policy has worked in politics and in practice. The educational reforms of recent decades have had the ambition to decentralize and give a clear responsibility for concretization and implementation of national goals to teachers, school leaders and school owners. For these actors, this means responsibility for strategic planning, design and implementation of measures in addition to evaluation of results based on national goals. In LOaPP, we have studied how educational reforms can change everyday school life and the interaction between school management, teacher and student. We have studied how politicians, school leaders and teachers work with competence goals and assessment in three secondary schools in three different municipalities in Eastern Norway. The aim of the project has been to gain new knowledge about how new ways of governing the school are used by the authorities, and how teachers, school leaders and municipalities relate to this in the school's practice. Our studies so far show that work with competence goals and assessment has been given a prominent place in everyday school life in planning, teaching and assessment. The studies also show that teachers often use working methods that integrate teaching and assessment, and that the idea of ??students learning together is central. These are working methods that can challenge traditional demarcation lines between teaching / assessment, formative / summative assessment and individual work / group work used in both politics and research.

LOaPP har presentert oppdatert kunnskap om forhold mellom politikk, reformen Kunnskapsløftet, og skolelederes, læreres og elevers arbeid i ungdomsskolen. Prosjektet har satt fokus på den sterkere betoningen av vurdering i skolens arbeid og konsekvenser det har for læreres og elevers arbeid. Prosjektets bidrag er relevant for videre utvikling av utdanningspolitikk, skolens arbeid med undervisning, lærerutdanning og for videre studer av forholdet mellom politikk og skolens praksiser. Viktige effekter av prosjektets arbeider er en fornyet fokus på læreren som endringsagent i skolen og økt kompleksitet i skolens arbeid med undervisning og vurdering.

The study investigates how the recently introduced learning outcomes oriented education policy and new ways of governing are constructed in documents in Norwegian education policy at national central level, at regional level and in schools, and further how this policy and its ways of governing unfold in practices in schools. At school level the project focus on «learning outcomes policies» as potentially practiced in three focal points of assessment, 1) the types of classroom assessment that are in use 2) individual and collective approaches to assessment and 3) practices of grading. These are all areas that have been heavily reformed and more extensively regulated in new ways due to shifts in policy.Theoretically the study build on ideas on public policy instruments related to introduction of LO policies and governing. Further the project connects to practises in schools with theories on meaning making (Coburn 2006) and inscription (Roth & MicGinn 1998). As such the study is about how centrally defined practices of policy and governing and the practices of schools meet over available instruments, techniques and tools in varied meaning making processes.The study seeks to investigate learning outcome as an interactionally constituted phenomenon, by drawing on sociocultural perspective on learning and assessment (Greeno, Collins, & Resnick, 1996). Through a multi-method design with four interconnected work packages of: WP1) a comprehensive document analysis focusing on national, regional as well as local school level, WP2) an ethnographic study of practices in 3 schools, WP3) observation studies of specifically selected assessment practices and WP4) research synthesis, the study addresses issues under Thematic Priority Area C, providing knowledge about the complex interrelations between new ways and tools for governing that follow from reforms and the practices of practitioners and actors in schools. Priority Area A on outcomes and assessment are also addressed.