Policy and the standards debate: mapping changes in assessment in mathematics

ABSTRACT

The influences on governments for policy changes in schools range across many agencies, including the political party in power. When policies change, the sources of these influences are not always clear. The project whose work is presented in this special issue examines what these changes look like in terms of the differences in assessment tasks of school pupils’ mathematics, over time. In this article we attempt to develop a graph, which we argue will have general applicability internationally, that can help to reveal the sources and nature of those influences. We construct the graph in interaction with an examination of the most recent changes in two countries. We argue that our analysis is a necessary complement to the project’s findings in that it enables us to identify the fields of recontextualisation, their relative strengths in terms of influence and hence conjecture their impact on the mathematics curriculum.