Assessing health education

This chapter examines the process of assessment in health education further supports the notion that health education is a complex and contested pedagogical space. Assessment in health education plays critical role in shaping the skills, knowledge and understandings that are valued in health education and ultimately, beyond it. Assessment literacy can help to empower teachers and students purposeful and educationally informative engagement with assessment tasks in health education. The chapter enhances the capacity of teachers and school leaders to clearly articulate what they can and cannot be held accountable for in the name of health education. It presents assessment as simultaneously political and pedagogical and as much a part of the politics of knowledge as curriculum. In health education accountability pressures are compounded, generated as they are from health policy as well as education policy sources.