Practice and reflections on practice are insufficient to ensure optimum understanding of what we do. Although empirical research can help to clarify and support this (Lakoff and Johnson,1999), it is theory which remains the single most encompassing aspect which will provide coherence and cohesion to our practices, arguments and research.
In the past 40 years great changes have taken place in learning and teaching, and a strange separation appears with assessment. Whereas the former has developed pedagogies according to learner and learning-centred rationales, assessment has not followed these logical developments and remained essentially teacher-centred. There are a number of reasons why this might be so. One critical reason is posited that the logical inclusion of learners in assessment has seemed a step too far in relinquishing the locus of power from tutors and transferring it to learners. Others are linked directly to assessment, which is the focus of this paper. Perhaps the necessary theoretical discussions which could bring learning, teaching and assessment together coherently have either not been considered available or not been convincingly engaging to the academic community. This could be due to a number of factors:theories of assessment and much of the work on assessment is often considered a specialist area; similarly, the literature on assessment is relatively limited, often confined to the ubiquitous chapter in learning and teaching books. Finally, the theories of assessment are little discussed and find little harmony within and across education communities (Taras 2009).