Compulsory School for Students with Intellectual Disabilities (CSSID) in Sweden is undergoing extensive policy change with the overall argument of promoting inclusive education. Core is a guarantee regarding support measures to enable achievement, which is in turn connected to increased national assessment and the implementation of a revised curriculum. In this change, increased equity and quality have been stated as motives. At the same time, equity and quality has shown to be challenged in the Nordic education systems (Frønes et al., 2020). The political will and enhancement of assessment in education is a phenomenon troughout Europe, often with the incentive to reform education deriving from international comparisons of knowledge, as PISA for example.
Through the shifting governing of CSSID, towards assessment, discourses of normality and of assessment joins forces and pushes ACS toward the discourse on learning, knowledge and assessment of the mainstream compulsory school (Andersson et al, 2023).). This is an example on how neoliberal values are embedded in today’s schooling and inclusion, equity, and quality are often approached as being promoted by comparison and competition (Blossing et al., 2014; Harvey, 2005; Smith, 2018; Yang Hansen and Gustafsson, 2016). This phenomenon has also appeared in other contexts and has been criticized by researchers who emphasize that quality of life, equity and self-determination need to be focused to a greater extent. Something that can be achieved by considering inclusion as an ethical responsibility that school and society have, rather than reducing inclusion to neoliberal values that include knowledge assessment, competition, comparison, and freedom of choice (Brossard Børhaug & Reindal, 2018). In relation to this, Waitoller (2020) discusses the force of accumulation, which refers to the identification and sorting of students as able or not. Furthermore, learners’ identity is within the realm of assessment often linked to the ideal of the neoliberal human being. Whenever this ideal is not met, due to individuals having deficits, it is seen as a threat to economic progress (Ball, 2013). We claim that these circumstances especially impact students ASC and is reinforced during assessment.
The purpose of the study is to contribute knowledge on national assessment for compulsory students with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) in Sweden. For the current paper, we have developed the method for selection and analysis and have focused on two governmental investigations to do so. Furthermore, we will put the results in relation to global and traveling discourses on assessment of knowledge and students with ID and discuss the outcome in relation to New Public Management and how policy mediates meaning (see Ball, 2013; 2017). In prolongation, we will analyze policy as well as the national assessment material itself and how these together constructs students’ knowledge, the student with ID as a learner and the assessment itself.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used
Drawing on Popkewitz (2014), Hacking (1999), and Foucault (1994), we understand "fabrication" as the simultaneous making up of and making sense of reality by attributing characteristics, hopes and prerequisites to students, their knowledge and assessment. Policies are then understood to inscribe meaning and condition the students with ID and their knowledge, thus fabricating certain types of students, knowledges, and assessment. This brings forth possibilities and limitations regarding who and what kind of students and knowledge can and should be in(ex)cluded, but also what assessment means in the context of national assessment in ACS.The Open data archive of the Swedish Parliament database (OpAL ) has been advocated to select governmental investigations connected to national assessment for students with ID. In addition, and at a later state, the national assessment material for the early schoolyears in mathematics, will also be analysed. For the study at hand, a discursive reading and analysis of how the student with ID and his/her knowledge is fabricated is performed alongside with the fabrication of national assessment.
Two governmental investigations which lies in the heart of this was selected. These concern the evaluation of goal and targets in school (SOU 2007:28) and grading and assessment for representing students’ knowledge in CSSID (SOU 2020:43).The analysis was performed in a two step procedure and builds on a previous study on how policy document fabricated inclusion for students with ID (Andersson et al., 2023). Sections of texts that concerned assessment of knowledge and the student with ID in these two policy documents was selected. Thereafter, an exploratory and quantitative thematic analysis was performed and in which statements on the student, the student’s knowledge, and assessment, were collected into three themes (Creswell, 2007). The corpus of data was thereafter analyzed out from how inclusions, exclusions, categories, and labelling constructed and fabricated meaning on the students, the student’s knowledge, and assessment. This was explored and thereafter formulated in terms of what kind of students, knowledge and assessment was fabricated. Hence, we have systematically explored characteristics, hopes and prerequisites attributed to students, their knowledge and assessment and their interrelatedness (see Hacking 1999; Popkewitz 2012; Valero 2017).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings
The two governmental investigations are proceeding the current policy change to make national assessment mandatory in CSSID. The 13 years between them point towards policy traveling in a certain direction. In the investigation Goal and targets for learning in compulsory school, suggestion to new national assessment system (SOU 2007:28), the child was fabricated as not challenged and as recipient of care, as someone special and hard for schools to teach and finally, as challenged in meeting standards. In connection to this fabrication of the student, the students’ knowledge was fabricated as important to normalize as far as possible, as relative to students’ prerequisites and as absent in terms of possible goals to reach in the curricula. How then to assess the students’ knowledge and the meaning inscribed into assessment for these students was fabricated as voluntary, crucially absent, and also highly needed. When turning to the later governmental investigation Build, assess, grade - grades that better correspond to the students' knowledge (SOU 2020:43), this lack of assessment and need to normalise and make students’ knowledge visible has been enhanced. The student is then fabricated as having a right to documentation of their knowledge, but also being deprived this. Paradoxically enough, the student with ID is also fabricated as not having use of an exam or grading and fabricated as not talented enough. Furthermore, knowledge is in connection to this fabricated as needed to be situated in close perimeter to society and what goes on in the real world. The assessment of knowledge is fabricated as an exception or needing exceptions to work, as less important to these students and as making students disadvantaged, in the case of grading. Assessment is fabricated as not systematised, so even if it is done, it is not considered as valuable to collect nationally.
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