A Situated Lens to Designing Assessments of Citizenship Competency

As education systems increasingly emphasize teaching for the development of competency, teachers need support in how to design classroom assessments of competencies associated with their areas of learning. Teachers who engage students in learning democracy through deliberative dialogue and participation in real-world processes will find limited support in the literature on how to operationalize the development of associated competencies. In this first design cycle of an ongoing multi-stage design-based research study, a researcher and two classroom teachers in British Columbia collaborated to apply principles of authentic assessment (Koh, 2017) to the design of an assessment of the citizenship competencies Grades 6 and 7 students may have developed when deliberating as citizens in a real-world public engagement process. Findings suggest promising value in using a situated lens and an associated heuristic to operationalize these competencies, and the ability to prioritize to be a potentially transferable feature of citizenship competency.