Graeme Withers and Margaret Gill, assessing text response: the 1990 pilot CAT: a review for teachers, Carlton: Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board (VCAB)

The Assessment Issue of 'English in Australia' has prompted Brenton Doecke to ask himself about significant moments in the history of subject English in Australia when truly innovative work was done in the area of assessing English. There are many examples to choose from, including Brian Johnston's 'Assessing English: Helping Students to Reflect on Their Work' (1983/1987), which provided excellent support to teachers who were implementing process writing in their classrooms in the 1980s; Robert McGregor and Marion Meiers' 'Telling the Whole Story: Assessing Achievement in English' (1991), which showed what teachers can learn through careful observation of students' language from day-to-day; and Brian Johnston and Stephen Dowdy's 'Work Required: Teaching and Assessing in a Negotiated Curriculum' (1988), a book with a cross-disciplinary focus that was designed, as its subtitle suggests, to support teachers in a range of subject areas to implement forms of assessment that were congruent with the ideal of negotiating the curriculum with students. All these publications are signs of an extraordinarily rich period in Australian curriculum history, when English teachers were able to exercise their professional responsibility in developing and implementing forms of assessment that accorded with their sense of the richness of their subject area. The text that Brenton eventually chose for 'Perspectives from the Past' was Graeme Withers and Margaret Gill's, 'Assessing Text Response: The 1990 Pilot CAT: A Review for Teachers'. This text is anchored in attempts by educators in Victoria in the 1980s and 1990s to develop and implement a new senior school curriculum that was responsive to a diverse student cohort and which would serve as more than an instrument for tertiary selection. Its significance, however, extends beyond the Victorian scene, because of the way it conceptualises a form of assessment that was congruent with what literary scholars and educators had come to understand about how readers make meaning from literary texts.