Bill & Ted's assessable adventure : a frame analysis of assessment representations in popular culture through Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Assessment is an integral component of formal schooling around the world and is often portrayed in film, television, and popular culture with several cultural constructions and mythologies attached. Notions of “pop quizzes,” cramming strategies for exams, or “cheat sheets” pepper the terminology illustrating the assessment landscape in schools. Assessment is often represented as being high-stakes, summative, stress and anxiety-inducing, exhausting, and, at times, the entire focus of students’ academic efforts at schools. Such essentialist or positivist portrayals prize knowledge as a truth, which can be acquired and possessed, and assessment tasks as linear attempts to make students reproduce those truths (Delandshere & Petrosky, 1994).