As a teacher, you will broker syllabuses, Australian Curriculum content and the local cultural knowledge that is valued in your community, to develop tasks and provide classroom experiences that foster quality learning. You will need to understand the different forms of assessment, their purposes and the tools available to you. As you progress in your career, you will continue to develop the skills and knowledge required to activate a collaborative classroom culture that promotes student ownership of learning and enables students to foster each other’s learning through classroom assessment. You will work in partnerships with students, colleagues and parents/carers to curate authentic evidence of learning. In this chapter, we examine forms of assessment, the most effective types of feedback and how teachers use assessment data in teaching, planning and reporting practices.

Natural law theory’s opposition to lying and its conception of the various goods that are the objects of our choices as incommensurable have implications for our thinking about the undertheorized practice of assigning grades to students. This practice is one to which liberals, concerned with fairness and merit, should perhaps pay more attention. In light of concerns related to truth and incommensurability, there is, Chapter 3 suggests, good reason to reject a number of conventional grading techniques and approaches, putatively warranted by what I call “academic consequentialism” and “academic retributivism.”