What do I need to know about quality and equity in the assessment of plurilingual, intercultural and democratic competences and the use of portfolios?

Assessment plays a major role in education. At the very least, it is essential for understanding whether instructional practices have resulted in the achievement of the intended learning outcomes. In addition, assessment is important for identifying learning outcomes that have not been achieved, and obstacles or difficulties that learners may be encountering. This in turn helps teachers to monitor and improve their methods and practices, as well as learners to become aware of their own learning difficulties and strategies. Assessment is also a key tool for educational systems and societies at large, as it provides evidence that their values and principles are being passed on to younger generations. Assessment can also impact seriously on equity in access to quality education. In some educational systems, results in tests or exams are used in streaming practices, which separate learners into different classes based on their abilities and achievements. In cases where the streaming is accompanied by a different curriculum, the consequence can be the introduction of significant educational inequities. In addition, poor results in assessment are one of the principal reasons why many learners drop out of education. Assessment, being an interface between school and society, thus potentially represents a major social barrier for many learners. While in many of these cases assessment is possibly more a visible manifestation than a cause of inequalities in education, it can itself also be a further source of educational discrimination when it fails to recognise (and encourage) learners’ distinctive personalities, social needs, and learning diversities. This may happen for example when assessment tasks presume a specific background knowledge that only majority-group learners have or when it ignores the difficulties of taking a test in a second language. In this sense, we argue, pursuing equity in assessment is a vital way to ensure both equity and quality in education more generally. Based on the considerations above, this chapter focuses on how developing plurilingual, intercultural, and democratic competences in schools, colleges, or universities, when viewed from the perspective of quality and equity in education, requires the use of responsible and ethical ways to assess such competences. In this respect, it will be argued that portfolios represent a highly suitable method for assessing plurilingual, intercultural, and democratic competences, because they can help to ensure that assessment practices are not only accurate, but also mindful of the consequences of assessment, respectful of learners’ differences, and attentive to the value of everyone’s background, learning, and personal and social needs. Portfolios owe most of these features to their being ideal methods to use for formative assessment. Even though they can potentially be employed for summative purposes (when ‘assessment of learning’ finally prevails over ‘assessment for learning’), their optimal use is formative, as their main scope is providing learners ‘with the opportunity to reflect on their competences, to collect data and documents which support and stimulate their reflections, and to think about how they will further develop their competences in the future’ (Council of Europe, 2021a: 5). In other words, portfolios link assessment to learning, by focusing on learners’ awareness, critical reflection, and self-evaluation. This chapter starts by outlining some key features of assessment that, in education at large, can foster or inhibit quality and equity. It then shifts the focus to the specific cases of plurilingual, intercultural, and democratic competences, whose specificities cannot be ignored and require a competent use of portfolios as a primary assessment tool. The following section is dedicated to the description of two portfolios, developed by the Council of Europe, which can be used to assess these competences. The final section draws some general conclusions.