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2 references
In this official report to the Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur Farida Shaheed treats curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment as interconnected elements through which the right to education is realised.
The report foregrounds participation, inclusion, dignity, cultural relevance, creativity, critical thinking, wellbeing, and the full development of learners. It argues that educational quality cannot be reduced to test performance or content coverage and considers the responsibilities of states and education systems when designing and evaluating learning. For educators and leaders, it provides a rights-based lens for aligning what is taught, how learning is organised, and how progress is assessed.
It is a normative human-rights report rather than an experimental study, and should be interpreted in that role.
Shepard argues that assessment should be reconceived as part of a learning culture rather than as a separate apparatus for ranking and control. Earlier measurement traditions were shaped by behaviourist and differential-psychology assumptions that treated ability as relatively fixed, separated tests from instruction, and favoured decontextualised items.
Contemporary cognitive, constructivist, and sociocultural research instead portrays learning as building understanding through prior knowledge, participation, language, tools, and disciplinary practice. Assessment should therefore make thinking visible, support feedback and self-assessment, use meaningful tasks, and help teachers adapt instruction. Classroom assessment and external accountability serve different purposes and should not be allowed to distort one another. Equity requires attention to opportunity to learn, cultural and linguistic context, and the consequences of assessment use.
For educators, the article supports eliciting explanations and strategies, discussing criteria and exemplars, involving learners in judgement, and using evidence while learning is still changeable. A learning culture maintains high expectations but treats error as information and assessment as a reciprocal process embedded in teaching, not merely a score delivered afterward.
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