Assessment Without Scores through Narrative and Formative Assessment Paradigms

Abstract

Scores and grades dominate educational assessment because they compress complex learning into portable, comparable symbols, yet an influential body of scholarship argues that this compression damages learning itself. This paper critically reviews two paradigms that loosen the grip of the score: narrative assessment, which represents learning as an evidenced account of progress over time, and formative assessment, which subordinates judgement to the improvement of learning while it is still underway. Using a critical narrative review method, the paper selects landmark theoretical works, systematic and narrative reviews, meta-analyses, and official curriculum documents, and reads them against one another in order to test what each paradigm can and cannot do. The review finds that scores perform social and psychometric functions that narratives cannot replace at scale, including selection, certification, aggregation, and system monitoring, while narratives preserve exactly what scores erase: process, context, identity, disposition, and the next step a learner should take. Evidence on learning effects supports well designed formative practice but is more modest and more contested than early claims suggested, and the defining experiments on comments and grades show that appending a grade can cancel the benefit of formative comment. Score-free assessment therefore fails when it is treated as a slogan and succeeds only where purpose is separated from certification, where shared criteria and moderation discipline narrative judgement, where workload is honestly resourced, and where reporting to parents and systems is redesigned rather than merely renumbered. The paper's novelty lies in joining validity theory, grading history, and curriculum policy, including Indonesia's Kurikulum Merdeka, into a single set of conditions under which assessment without scores is defensible at scale.