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Assessment
It is the use of assessment which makes teaching into teaching.
Mere presentation—without assessment of what the learners
have made of what you have offered them—is not teaching.
Assessment should not therefore be seen as a discrete process,
but as integral to every stage of teaching, from minute to
minute as much as module to module.

Assessment “reaches back” into the rest of teaching: in


particular, poorly designed formal assessment regimes can
severely hinder student learning and distort the process and
subject matter.

All assessment is ultimately subjective: there is no such thing


as an “objective test”. Even when there is a high degree of
standardisation, the judgement of what things are tested and
what constitutes a criterion of satisfactory performance is in the
hands of the assessor.

However, we can still make every effort to ensure that


assessment is valid, reliable and fair.

Validity
A valid form of assessment is one which measures what it is
supposed to measure.

 It does not assess memory, when it is supposed to be


assessing problem-solving (and vice versa).
 It does not grade someone on the quality of their
writing, when writing skills are not relevant to the topic
being assessed, but it does when they are.
 It does seek to cover as much of the assessable material
as practicable, not relying on inference from a small and
arbitrary sample (and here it spills over into reliability).

Unfortunately, no assessment is completely valid.

Reliability
Or "replicability". A reliable assessment will produce the same
results on re-test, and will produce similar results with a similar
cohort of students, so it is consistent in its methods and
criteria.

Fairness
This is really an aspect of validity, but important enough to note
in its own right. Fairness ensures that everyone has an equal
chance of getting a good assessment. This may include (where
appropriate) anonymity of submitted material, so that
extraneous considerations (such as the quality of contributions
in seminars, if they are not part of the assessment scheme)
cannot influence the final result.

Purposes of Assessment
The traditional distinction is between summative and formative
assessment.

Summative assessment is what students tend to focus on. It is


the assessment, usually on completion of a course or module,
which says whether or not you have "passed". It is—or should
be—undertaken with reference to all the objectives or outcomes
of the course, and is usually fairly formal.

Considerations of security—ensuring that the student who gets


the credit is the person who did the work—assume considerable
importance in summative assessment, which may push in the
direction of using conservative approaches such as
examinations, which are not necessarily highly valid.

Note that all summative assessment can also be formative, if


the feedback offered is sufficient.

Formative assessment is going on all the time. Its purpose is


to provide feedback on what students are learning:

 to the student: to identify achievement and areas for


further work
 to the teacher: to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching
to date, and to focus future plans.

While grades or marks may assume primary importance in


summative assessment, their role in formative assessment is
simply to contribute to the feedback process: marks against
specific criteria (such as "use of sources", "presentation of
argument") may be much more use than global judgements.

One more distinction


It is also possible to distinguish between Norm- and Criterion-
and even Ipsative-referenced assessment schemes.

Norm-referencing is basically competitive: it is a ranking


exercise. Out of any given group, the top 5% get "A"s, the next
10% get "B"s, etc. and the bottom 50% fail. (The figures are of
course arbitrary) This may be fair enough when the purpose is
to select for a fixed and limited number of positions, such as
jobs or places on a course or a sports team. The quality,
however, can vary widely from group to group of candidates. It
may reassure the public in sensitive areas, because a fixed
proportion of candidates is always rejected, but can be grossly
unfair. It also effectively demands a test in which less able
candidates are progressively rejected, like a high-jump
competition in which the bar is progressively raised until
competitors fail to jump it. It is worth noting that IQ tests tend
to be structured like this, and of course the IQ is a norm-
referenced measure.

Criterion-referencing is the term used for assessment against


fixed criteria. [Personal beef here: "criterion" is the singular,
"criteria" the plural: I heard someone refers to "criterias" the
other day!] Theoretically, it can mean that everyone who
undertakes a given assessment may pass it, or no-one might.
Even norm-referencing requires reference to criteria, of course,
but full criterion-referencing ignores the statistical implications
of the assessment profile: it is thus inherently fairer, as long as
the criteria are determined in advance, and they are valid and
reliable.

And then there is ipsative assessment, which is assessment


against yourself, or more particularly against your own previous
best performance. It is more relevant to performance coaching,
special needs education and therapy than to most mainstream
teaching.

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