There is a disparity between work completed within the context of in-school curriculum and the pressures and constraints associated with external assessment.
In New South Wales external assessment, like the School Certificate, the Higher School Certificate and now the national literacy and numeracy assessments where over 1.2 million students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 from more than 9,000 schools across Australia will sit the first tests in literacy and numeracy suggests that standardised testing is the measure of a school's success in the eyes of the government and many educative bodies.
These tests, (currently) pen and paper tests, that are undertaken in seated, silent and structured examination rooms or classrooms, are throw-backs to the beginning of last century. (The computer assessment for NSW school certificate students is the exception as an on-line test).
The correlation between student performance in this kind of testing and the possibilities available to both learners and teachers grate against the open-ended nature of using virtual classrooms, wikis, moodling etc. to assess a students understanding of texts, contexts and their place as producers of texts.
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