⏤ 🟡 DRAFT – EARLY WORK IN PROGRESS 🟡 ⏤
Draft Updated: Friday, August 29, 2025
Summary: Learning assessment exists to serve learning and center the flourishing of all students — anticipating barriers and inequities before they appear, so that assessments are opportunities for flourishing rather than exercises in sorting, ranking, punishing, excluding, or gatekeeping learning opportunities.
Description: At its heart, GOAL makes clear that assessment should serve learning, not gate keep it. Traditional grading often functions as a sorting mechanism, ranking and excluding in ways that reproduce systemic inequities. GOAL reorients assessment toward engagement, curiosity, and growth—positioning students as co-participants in meaning-making.
To be truly learning-centered, purpose must also be proactive. Carillo (2021) critiques labor-based grading for assuming labor is neutral — privileging able-bodied, neurotypical, and socioeconomically advantaged students. Dolmage (2017) warns against “retrofits,” symbolic fixes that preserve exclusion while claiming inclusion. Price (2011) demonstrates how academe’s dominant approaches to space-making privilege quick thinking, presence, and normative performance — yet, as Johnson (2014) notes, Price stops short of sustained intersectional analysis.
GOAL builds on these insights by embedding intersectionality (Crenshaw), disability justice, and universal design principles at the level of purpose itself. This means asking: What inequities are we anticipating? Whose flourishing does this assessment serve? How do we define learning in ways that validate diverse minds, bodies, literacies, and trajectories?
Core Practices
- Write purpose statements that name both content goals and equity goals.
- Design assessments that create opportunities for growth, voice, and meaning-making, and not just demonstrations of so-called mastery.
- Use purpose statements to invite student engagement, input and co-definition of goals.
- Build proactive flexibility (e.g., multimodality, reflection) into assessment purpose and design.
- Audit purposes periodically: Do they assume a single “ideal student,” or anticipate a spectrum of learners?
Reflective Questions
- Does this assessment create genuine opportunity for all learners — or reinforce a narrow ideal of the “good student”?
- Whose ways of knowing and being are validated by the stated purpose? Whose are absent?
- Does the purpose anticipate barriers proactively, or leave them for students to disclose, navigate, and struggle with?
- In what ways are students invited to shape or co-author the purposes of their learning?
Lineage & Influences
- Black & Wiliam (1998); Stiggins (2004) shift assessment toward growth and formative practice.
- Inoue (2019, 2022) reframes assessment as a site of power and equity, resisting exclusionary norms.
- Blum (2020) emphasizes ungrading as dialogue and partnership.
- Carillo (2021) critiques labor-based grading for privileging normative bodyminds and calls for anticipatory design and flexibility.
- Dolmage (2017) warns that retrofitting is insufficient, pressing for proactive equity in higher education.
- Price (2011) demonstrates how academe’s rigid spaces privilege speed, presence, and rational performance, often excluding mental disability.
- Johnson (2014) affirms Price’s insights but highlights gaps in intersectional analysis, urging more expansive frameworks.
- Crenshaw (1989) establishes intersectionality as essential for anticipating overlapping inequities.
- CAST (2018) underscores goal clarity and barrier minimization through Universal Design for Learning.