Why do we assess students? Is it simply to ensure they have memorised key dates, names and places that our culture views as significant? The answer to this is clearly a resounding ‘no’. Assessment is driven by the aims of the curriculum, and as with many discipline areas, the purview of history curricula both in Australia and around the world has broadened from rote learned, mono-cultural national narratives to a focus on the benefits of developing what many term ‘historical consciousness’ (Jeissman, 1979, p.40–42). So how do we ensure that students have gained both substantive and disciplinary knowledge, or the historical knowledge, historical thinking skills and historical consciousness that our national curriculum aims for? We need to make use of a wide range of assessment types that allow students to demonstrate the full breadth and depth of their learning so that we can make an informed judgement about their progress. We can do this through diagnostic assessments, which are assessments for learning that help inform teacher planning; formative assessments, which are assessments as learning that help students understand where the gaps in their knowledge and skills lie; and summative assessments, which are assessments of learning that provide information to both teachers and students about how the student has been able to demonstrate the syllabus objectives to date.

Based on the temporal schema of “hospicing late mono/lingualism” explored in Chapter 4, the Epilogue takes up the question of accountability to other generations of multilingual subjects, past and future, and considers how we may set out to assess that accountability. The epilogue ends in the form of an “Undercommon Framework of Reference for Languages,” based on the European Framework, as reinterpreted through the lens of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s Black Studies-based conception of the Undercommons (2013). The book closes with a conceptual glossary of terms, used throughout these chapters and the Introduction, that aid the purposeful work of reinvigorating multilingualism for the coming century.

As a teacher, you will broker syllabuses, Australian Curriculum content and the local cultural knowledge that is valued in your community, to develop tasks and provide classroom experiences that foster quality learning. You will need to understand the different forms of assessment, their purposes and the tools available to you. As you progress in your career, you will continue to develop the skills and knowledge required to activate a collaborative classroom culture that promotes student ownership of learning and enables students to foster each other’s learning through classroom assessment. You will work in partnerships with students, colleagues and parents/carers to curate authentic evidence of learning. In this chapter, we examine forms of assessment, the most effective types of feedback and how teachers use assessment data in teaching, planning and reporting practices.

Assessment of transformative learning is challenging because key aspects of the transformative experience are often difficult for faculty to recognize and for students to communicate. Also, there is an affective component involved in the struggles students face when encountering disorienting dilemmas and the subsequent perspective shifts that must occur to accommodate new ways of making sense of self, others, and the world. There are ways to track and measure student progress across an arc of development in those important beyond-disciplinary and life skills and mindsets that are the hallmarks of good employees, entrepreneurs, artists, citizens, and family members – humans that are, in short, creators, not just consumers. Faculty generally must be trained in this process because creating good reflective prompts and spotting individual students’ idiosyncratic expressions as they attempt to put into words felt shifts of worldview are not typically part of PhD curricula. One Midwestern, regional state university in the US has met the challenge of eliciting and assessing transformative learning. Lessons learned and specific, replicable processes and tools are shared in this chapter.