By Eva Frydensberg Holm

How is the bilingual Danish knowledge doing? Have the Danish pupils become better readers? And how are they
doing compared to the other OECD countries?

We are in for tests, assessments and evaluations in the Danish primary school. And this to such a degree that Peter Dahler-Larsen, Prof. of Evaluation at the University of Southern Denmark now suggests a stop for further documentation.

"This is of course meant as a joke. However, my point is that if you introduce a stop for further documentation, the politicians would be forced to prioritise what information they need. Right now it seems to be a case of "as long as we measure, we will see an improvement and a development will occur". We have to test and test and test again - until we drop dead. Meaning, if only we test, we will get the quality under control. However, weighing the pig does NOT make it heavier."

Peter Dahler-Larsen believes that it is quite legitimate to require that the schools inform the rest of the society about what is going on, but he is annoyed with the fact that assessing equals quality development. We need more interesting mechanisms to create a development.

"It is not like counting road casualties. The quality in the schools is difficult to assess - and is a much discussed subject. Assessing with the purpose of rationalising will not give more quality, however, you risk turning the actual object being assessed into quality, and at worst it may squander our quality concept," he says.

"Teaching to the test" is one of the dangers he points out. And it results in a number of side effects. For instance, the teaching content has to be revised as not everything is suitable for testing. In biology, for instance, a question like "What does the hare eat?" would win over a question like "what does ecological relationship mean?", as it is easier to test.

Check whether it works

According to Peter Dahler-Larsen there is a great difference from country to country in how the tests work. In Sweden, the tests have become more popular in the school. The sweedes have good experience in using the assessments and evaluations constructively in the Swedish nine-year compulsory school system. And even though Peter Dahler-Larsen cannot tell why this is the case, he points, among others, at the fact that they have decided to concentrate on a smaller number of tests - in mathematics, English and Swedish - and they have moreover concentrated on checking what is working by asking the pupils, parents and teachers.

"In Denmark we have a far too long tradition of not checking whether something is working. The national tests are an excellent example. First you make them compulsory and then you check whether they work. Why did they not make a dummy in the Local Authority of Vissenbjerg, Denmark, to check what really worked before making the tests compulsory on a national basis?"

The Danish primary and lower secondary school is not a knowledge culture

Peter Dahler-Lasen finds that the tradition of not checking what is working and not using whatever available information we have on the topic is one of the reasons why tests and evaluations are met with great resistance in the Danish primary school.

"Those who want to test have challenged the school with a very plain rhetoric indicating 'get ready for some tests'. They should rather have said: Let us start a new place. Let us hear what you do and use what you know – let us try to be knowledge-based."

Peter Dahler-Larsen believes that knowledge basing is the hope if one is to concentrate on the more complex mechanisms. In this way, one could create an evaluation system which actually contributes to the development of quality in the Danish primary school. But he admits that it is not an easy thing to do as the Danish primary and lower secondary school is not a knowledge culture. On the contrary, the Danish primary school rests on a long tradition of sharing a community based on values.

According to Peter Dahler-Larsen, this means that the Danish teachers have identified themselves as community persons rather than knowledge persons, and the tradition is not to check in practise. It is not traditional to see a connection between educational practice and empirical studies. And as Peter Dahler-Larsen explains, it is therefore difficult for many teachers to enter into a dialogue about the sometimes dim tests and assessments - and for instance say: We know better than the reading survey - and we have three suggestions for what to do.
He compares it with the medical world where the tradition of examining themselves is quite different.

"It was first of all not some quality consultant who forced the doctors to do evaluations. No, no, they asked themselves: Why did he die yesterday? And could we have acted differently? Could we find out what actually worked? They have developed a practice within their own profession. And they could therefore never have been shocked in the same way as the teachers when they learned the results from PISA. The Danish teachers missed the cure - the knowledge enabling them to say: We know better than the reading survey and we know what to do," Peter Dahler-Larsen explains.

And he quickly adds that naturally there could be a reason to listen to the opposition of the teachers. Especially in a time where it can be difficult to find the legitimacy in the demands for tests and evaluations.

A preference for numbers

Here, in the western culture we have a preference for numbers and we tend to consider numbers as the simple truth. According to Peter Dahler-Larsen, this is also the case when we discuss tests and evaluations in the Danish primary and lower secondary school.

"I suppose that the ardent proponents and the ardent opponents are equally stupid. In both cases, they assume that the assessment is the absolute truth. The proponents say: It is good or it is bad, and the opponents say: You cannot assess everything. Instead, they could say: Well, actually you can assess everything, but you could discuss what exactly it tells you something about. For instance, international reading surveys may very well tell you something, but they are certainly debatable," Peter Dahler-Larsen states.

He calls the ranking list of schools, which among others are published by CEPOS, fanatic because they demonstrate exactly what little it takes to either qualify or undermine the validity.

"Let us say that Hjalteskolen (a fictive Danish primary school) is rated as no. 1, some people may assume they could learn something quite essential about school quality by looking at Hjalteskolen. But what is cool is that when you run the same analysis two years in a row you will get quite different results. And now Hjalteskolen may be no. 866. This seems to show that the assessment tells more about the pupils, teachers, external examiners and the test given than the quality of the school. Information you could also get by reading that type of tables through an expert's eyes."

The world is not perfect

Peter Dahler-Larsen does not, as he puts it, believe the world to be perfect - nor does he believe that we will all become increasingly wiser in the Age of Enlightenment. But he hopes that the knowledge can be used fairly reflexively and fairly democratically. And despite the fact that he calls for improved surveys of the means rather than comparing numbers and schools, he notices some progress in the school political debate.

Among other things, there was a discussion about what the PISA results did actually say something about in connection with last year's PISA assessment - and for what this information could be used. According to Peter Dahler-Larsen, this would not have happened some years ago.

But he also notices another trend - viz. The wish to assure. And as long as we assess, we assure the quality. He wonders whether this is a result of September 11.

The idea of us preventing and really assuring that something unpleasant will not happen. And this, despite the fact what is unpleasant very rarely occurs.

"I believe that today many people subscribe to the idea that if only something prevents and assures, this is the way forward. In former times, the purpose of evaluating would have been to learn something about what we had done. We realised that the future was insecure. After we have made the evaluation compulsory, it seems as if we have to appropriate the future before it is here. And the question is what kind of education are we creating", says Peter Dahler-Larsen.

"Clever research scientists and businesspeople point out that defensive thinking in terms of tests, assurance and standardisation will definitely not breed breakthrough and industrious entrepreneur."

Facts

Peter Dahler-Larsen is professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Southern Denmark, where he researches in evaluation in the public sector.

Read more

Peter Dahler-Larsen (2006): Evalueringskultur - Et begreb bliver
til, Syddansk Universitetsforlag
(Evaluation culture – a concept is born, Syddansk Universitetsforlag)
Peter Dahler-Larsen (2008): Kvalitetens beskaffenhed, Syddansk
Universitetsforlag (The nature of quality, Syddansk Universitetsforlag)