DISTINCTIONS AMONG ASSESSMENTS, TESTS, MEASUREMENTS, AND EVALUATIONS
The general public often uses the terms assessment, test, measurement,and evaluation interchangeably, but it is important for you to distinguish among them.
This section explains the relationship among these terms (shown in Figure 1.3 ) and the way assessments inform educational decisions ( Figure 1.1 ).
Assessment
Assessment is a broad term defined as a process for obtaining information for making decisions about students; curricula, programs, and schools; and educational policy.
When we say we are “assessing a student’s competence,” for example, we mean we are collecting information to help us
decide the degree to which the student has achieved intended learning outcomes.
A large number of assessment techniques may be used to collect this information: formal and informal observations of a
student; paper-and-pencil tests; a student’s performance on homework, lab work, research papers, projects, and during oral questioning; and analyses of a student’s records.
This book will help you decide which of these techniques are best for your particular teaching situations.
Guidelines for Selecting and Using Classroom Assessments
In order to focus your assessment activities on the information you need to make particular educational decisions in the classroom, you need to become competent in selecting and using assessments.
These five guiding principles will help you select and use educational assessments meaningfully.
1 . Be clear about the learning objectives you want to assess.
Before you can assess a student, you must know the kind(s) of student knowledge, skill(s), and performance(s) about which you need information.
The knowledge, skills, and performances you want students to learn are sometimes called learning goals or standards.
The more clearly you are able to specify these learning goals, the better you will be able to select the appropriate assessment techniques.
2. Be sure that the assessment techniques you select match the learning goal.
For example, if the goal specifies that students will be able to write poetry, solve a mathematical problem, or design a scientific experiment, the assessments should require students to do these things.
The assessment techniques selected should be as practical and efficient to use as possible, but practicality and efficiency should not be the overriding considerations.
3. Be sure that the selected assessment techniques serve the needs of the learners.
Proper assessment tools are concrete examples for students of what they are expected to do with their learning.
Assessment techniques should provide learners with opportunities for determining specifically what they have achieved and specifically what they must do to improve their performance.
Therefore, you should select assessment methods that allow you to provide meaningful feedback to the learners.
You should be able to tell students how closely they have approximated the learning goals.
Good assessment is good instruction.
4. Whenever possible, be sure to use multiple indicators of performance for each learning objective.
One format of assessment (such as short-answer questions or matching exercises) provides an incomplete picture of what a student has learned.
Because one assessment format tends to emphasize only one aspect of a complex learning goal, it typically underrepresents that goal.
Getting information about a student’s achievement from several assessment modalities usually enhances the validity of your assessments.
Matching exercises, for example, emphasize recall and recognition of factual information; essay questions emphasize organizing ideas and demonstrating writing skill under the pressure of time limits; and a monthlong project emphasizes freely using resources and research to more thoroughly analyze the topic.
All three of these assessment techniques may be needed to ascertain the extent to which a student has achieved a given learning standard.
5. Be sure that when you interpret—or help students interpret—the results of assessments, you take the limitations of such results into account.
Although Guiding Principle 2 calls for increasing the authenticity or meaningfulness of the assessment techniques, assessments in schools cannot completely reproduce those things we want students to learn in “real life.”
The information you obtain, even with several different types of assessments, is only a sample of a student’s attainment of a learning goal.
Because of this, information from assessment contains sampling error.
Also, factors such as a student’s physical and emotional conditions further limit the extent to which we can obtain truly accurate information.
Teachers, students, and others must make decisions nevertheless.
Those decisions must keep an assessment’s limitations in mind.