Call for papers on the theme: “Activities, teaching, learning and assessment”.

The Revue internationale du CRIRES: innovating in the tradition of Vygotsky is launching a call for papers on the theme of evaluation, with the aim of rethinking, reflecting, documenting and proposing diversified angles on evaluation practices from different perspectives. When it comes to evaluation, what are the desired ends? What proposals are made? What distinctions in the functions of evaluation activities in schools need to be considered? Are drifts being observed?

While a broad consensus surrounds the need to evaluate in education, the debates raised by evaluative practices reflect the diversity of viewpoints that it would be pertinent to recall. Whether it's an old debate revived by those who understand skills and knowledge in student assessment to be disjointed, or the limits imposed on teachers' professional autonomy by the return (or retention, as the case may be) of school reports with numerical grades rather than qualitative assessments evaluating the development of skills, to name but two examples, the conceptions, functions and purposes of assessment deserve attention. Here are a few points that may be of interest to the authors:

• In Quebec, teachers' initiative and professional autonomy may have been undermined by the return in 2007 of a school report card (“traditional” conception of the normative mode) with quantitative assessment -- with numerical grades -- rather than qualitative, with ratings assessing the development of competencies present in the QEP.
• In 2011, Quebec added to these elements the Cadres d'évaluation des apprentissages (MELS, 2001) and the Progression des apprentissages (MELS, 2011), which encourage teachers to advocate a traditional, behaviorist-inspired evaluation practice based primarily on administrative control, i.e., linked to the product-measurement evaluation model (Vial, 2012).
• What's more, many people understand the notions of knowledge and competence as separate, whereas the very definition of competence is inclusive of knowledge mobilized for the purpose of exercising a skill. All these tensions hinder the development of teachers' evaluative action, which is necessary if they are to exercise their professional judgement by limiting these tensions and, eventually, overcoming them. While knowledge assessment is a well-established practice, the methodology of knowledge assessment practices remains heterogeneous.
• The tension between assessment in the service of pupils (to enlighten, accompany and support learning progress) and assessment to satisfy control requirements (which relates to a results management culture designed to compare and rank pupils and schools, or to assess the effectiveness of an educational system) needs to be addressed by highlighting different purposes of assessment.
• From this perspective, the assessment of learning often detracts from the priority aims, namely: to help each school to bring as many pupils as possible through the schooling process successfully, by giving them the means to help pupils progress in their varied learning. In order to avoid the pitfalls of duality, we need to be aware of the prevailing ideological background to assessment practices and systems.

Articles (5,000 to 8,000 words) must be submitted by September 30, 2024 at the latest on the website Revue internationale du CRIRES : innover dans la tradition de Vygotsky (ulaval.ca)

Article proposals will undergo a double anonymous review, the results of which will be sent to the authors by November 20, 2024.  Publication is scheduled for the end of December 2024.

Aligned with the orientations presented, the publication of contributions is in line with the international trend towards free online dissemination of scientific and professional texts, and opts for an open access format (OJS) whose url address is as follows: https://revues.ulaval.ca/ojs/index.php/RIC/about/submissions