The contrast between the World Cup third-place playoff and the final was stark. In the former, England and France scored 10 goals in a palpitating, fluid game that kept spectators on the edge of their seats. Some of the goals were spectacular, there was a hat-trick, and at the end, a group of French and English players huddled together in a fraternal gesture. It was a fast-moving, dynamic game with an emphasis on scoring rather than defending.

The actual final between Spain and Argentina, on the other hand, was what so many finals have become: theatrics, diving, shamming, wasting time, red cards, and ending , of course, with a meagre scoreline after extra time. There was a lot that had nothing to do with the actual football while players spent their time exhorting the referee to give a yellow or red card to the other side and putting pressure on him at every play. The number of players who suddenly fell down, dozens of metres away from the ball while shamming a foul, was ridiculous. None of this takes anything away from a well-deserved victory by Spain, it is the style of play I am discussing here and what caused it.

So why was there such a difference in behaviour between these two finals?

One reason might be the difference in stakes. When you are playing in a final, the fear of loss is as great, if not greater, than the will to win, and this can create a sclerosis which essentially spoils the game, making it sterile and fundamentally negative. In the third-place game, on the other hand, the stakes are more symbolic, there is more risk-taking and free expression. You will rarely see players break down in tears losing such a match as they do in the finals.

This leads me to one of the most important principles in experimental psychology and the science of assessment: ecological validity. If a test is ecologically valid, it means that performance on it predicts behaviour in the real world. The more authentic an assessment is, the more natural the test-taking conditions, the higher the ecological validity.

If what we are looking for in forward-looking assessment systems is how to test 21st-century competences, such as creativity, criticality, intra- and interpersonal intelligence, systems thinking, and lifelong learning, then the conditions under which these are assessed should be as natural as possible. How do we ensure that students’ creative juices are flowing? How do we ensure that the test is not interfering with their critical thinking but allowing it to express itself? How do we ensure that the structure of the test-taking conditions does not distort the results?

The problem with high-stakes assessments, like the final of the World Cup, is that they bring out behaviours that are not actually the ones we are looking for, unless those engaged are able to ride above the stress and pressure and enter a flow, which can be done, but is very is difficult for experienced athletes to do, let alone high school students.

Perhaps the final was distorted by the stakes, which were so high that it was not an ecologically valid situation, if what is important to us is the beauty of the game and not the result and if what we wish to see happen in a football match is high quality football and not technical shenanigans . Ironically, the lower-pressure third place playoff, by being less stressful, created these conditions much better.

We should view the testing conditions we create more as a third-place playoff than a final, releasing students of the fear of failure that inhibits a joyous, free-flowing expression of competences. Let’s continue to work together in schools and universities to ensure high ecological validity so that the beauty of learning rather than the pressure to perform develops. Alternative assessments such as projects, portfolios, internal assessments, and other naturalistic, long-term tracking of competency development tend to do this better than the traditional high-stakes, narrow terminal assessment we have been using in schools for the last 200-odd years.