Living through assessment: Towards a working-class lived experience understanding of assessment in higher education

Abstract

Most approaches towards assessment take as their primary objects of analysis the procedures or outcomes that are part of assessment practices. However, an important part assessment practices are the experiences that the students have when they go through assessment. The aim of this paper is to build a new perspective on assessment that makes working-class students’ lived experience of assessment the focus of analysis through an integrative review. This review synthesises literature on socially just assessment practices with literature on working-class lived experiences in higher education. Working-class experiences are used as working-class students can benefit from a social justice approach to assessments, and their experience presents a wide spectrum of barriers that students might face when going through higher education. This synthesises this new perspective on assessment and suggests ways in which it may be put to use in empirical research in order to inform the use of assessments in pedagogy and curricula structures.