The learning assessment in the Portuguese compulsory education and the reinforcement of the externa summative assessment

Abstract

In the last decades, the assessment of learning, has been used by the economically developed states as a process of monitoring and accountability of the quality of school education, which have been called accountability processes. This has been achieved by increasing the external summative assessment by standardized national tests. The results obtained by the students in these tests serve as a barometer to measure and monitor the quality of education, with reference to standards that are uniform, economically determined and visible in certain officially established goals for school education. It is by measuring the achievement of these goals by pupils in national tests that the measurement and monitoring of educational quality by the states is processed. Portugal is not apart from this neoliberal and neoconservative influence on education. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyze and reflect on the changes in the legal guidelines for the assessment of learning in compulsory education which have been implemented since 2012 and must be framed in a mitigated neoliberal ideology. My analysis and reflection focus on the normative documents which currently regulate the learning assessment in the Portuguese compulsory education and which have resulted in the widening of the national tests in mathematics and Portuguese in the three cycles of this level of education and also in the trend to value the results at the expense of the learning processes.