Assessing ethics education through national tests—an advantage or not?

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to describe, critically analyse and discuss the Swedish system of assessing ethics education in compulsory school through national tests. The publicly available tests from 2013 for grades six and nine have been studied as have the assessment instructions for teachers. Staff responsible for the test construction have been interviewed. The aims, core content and knowledge requirements of the curriculum were also studied. The concept 'ethical competence' was used as an analytical tool in the qualitative content analyses. Through the design of this study, the actual test, its process of construction and the curriculum were examined. The results suggest that ethics education, given (a) the curricular construction of what ability to assess, (b) complexities of test construction in ethics and (c) possible teach-to-the-test effects, runs the risk of being limited to an argumentative, conceptual competence, with ethics education being emptied of crucial content. However, being included in national testing can strengthen the position of a school subject. Is it then an advantage for ethics education to be tested in this way? The critical problems the study raises make the author conclude it to be a disadvantage for ethics education to be tested through national tests.

Ethical competence expressed in students’ written texts

“…The importance of deciding what kind of ethics education one wants to offer is emphasised by Avci (2017). Sporre (2019) has analysed the Swedish curriculum and concluded that there is a focus on verbal and argumentative competences in line with a utilitarian or deontological approach to ethics, and that the ethics underlined in the Swedish National Test can be understood as preparing students for normative reasoning in order to understand how to act ethically (Sporre 2019). This analysis is in line with the instrumentalist approach that Walker et al (2015) describe as the dominant perspective in the policy arena today.…”

“…The Swedish National Test in RE, which tests ethics, focuses on verbal and argumentative competences in line with a utilitarian approach to ethics (Sporre 2019). The ethics emphasised in the Swedish National Test can be understood as preparing students for a normative reasoning in order to understand how to act in an ethical way (Sporre 2019). Assessing ethics education is a challenge (Alexander 2016).…”

Integrating character education into an elementary common core standards-aligned curriculum: a pilot study

“…These elements also correspond with key components of experiential/deep learning processes (Lavy 2019). Such learning processes have been found to be effective in promoting changes in thoughts and behavior, and trigger the development of new habits (Sporre 2019;Kolb 2014).…”

“…The major complaint about high-stakes testing is the limitations and narrowing of curricular content focusing on basic skills found only in the test material, reducing instruction of content knowledge (Arroyo-Romano and Benigno 2016). Thus, schools must find ways to effectively integrate academic content standards (CCSS)-amid expectations to prepare them for high-stakes testing-with educating for character (Fink and Geller 2016;Sporre 2019).…”

Powerful knowledge? A multidimensional ethical competence through a multitude of narratives

“…The EthiCo project was developed from the starting point that there are reasons to believe that the knowledge requirements and national tests limit central knowledge in ethics, that is, there may be broader conceptions of ethical competence than the stated analytical and argumentative competences. Analyses of national tests and their constructions have shown that not least the knowledge requirements of the syllabus of RE direct the test's focus such that primarily reasoning in ethics, an argumentative and conceptual competence, is tested; this, in turn, also means that EE is voided of crucial content (Sporre 2019).…”