Why do we assess?

To determine that the intended learning outcomes of the course are being achieved
To provide feedback to students on their learning, enabling them to improve their
performance
To motivate students to undertake appropriate work
To support and guide learning
To describe student attainment, informing decisions on progression and awards
To demonstrate that appropriate standards are being maintained
To evaluate the effectiveness of teaching

Anatomy of an Assessment
1. What do you want students to know or be able to do?
(the purpose or goal of the learning and, hopefully, by
extension, the purpose of the assessment)
2. What is the best assessment method to use given your
instructional goals? (the kind of assessment)
3. How are you going to evaluate the students
responses? (the analysis of the results)
4. What are you going to do with the information?
(predetermined use for the assessments)

Benefits of Successful Feedback

build confidence in the students
motivate students to improve their learning;
provide students with performance improvement
information,
correct errors
identify strengths and weaknesses

Constructive Alignment Theory

(Biggs, 1999)
- Theory of learning that begins with the premise that the
learner constructs his or her own learning through
relevant learning activities

 It is the teachers responsibility to fashion a learning

environment where the learning activities are wholly
appropriate to achieving the desired learning outcomes.
The key to achieving this goal is that all components in
the teaching system (ie. teaching process from planning
through assessing) are aligned to each other to
facilitate the achievement of the intended learning
outcomes.
Thus, the curriculum and its intended aims and learning
outcomes, the teaching methods and resources used to
support learning, and the assessment tasks and criteria

Aims

Assessment
methods and
tasks

Learning
Outcomes

Methods of
Learning

Alignment is central to effective assessment. Designing a course/module using a learning

outcomes approach recognises the need to plan assessment as part of a whole curriculum

Matching assessment with learning

outcomes
Learning outcomes are statements that predict what
learners will gain as a result of learning, so there should
be a clear relationship between learning outcomes and
assessment. It is possible to assess more than one
learning outcome at once as long as all assessment
tasks are appropriate to, and in harmony with, the
learning outcomes they are meant to assess.

Things to remember in Matching assessment with learning outcomes;

1. Ensure the assessment method tests the stated learning outcomes
2. Ensure the assessment method does not test any significant
learning outcomes that are not explicitly stated as such.
Assessment should never go beyond the learning outcomes. For
example, if the learning outcome states that the student should be
able to select an appropriate method, then the assessment task
should not go beyond this limit by asking to analyse the method.
3. Ensure all major course or module outcomes are assessed, as if
students are not going to be assessed on something its unlikely
that they will put time and effort into it. However, if you assess
every minor learning outcome of every module, then you run the
risk of over-assessing students.

 A carefully thought-out learning outcome will give a

solid indication to the lecturer of what kinds of
assessment are appropriate, and of the skills and
knowledge the learner will have to demonstrate to pass.
Finally, the clearer the learner outcome, the easier it will
be to devise an appropriate assessment.

Two types of Assessment according

to Purpose
Formative The purpose of formative assessment is to provide teacher
and student with feedback that can direct future teaching and
learning.
Central to formative assessment is the provision of quality
feedback. Feedback consists of information that tells us how
we are doing and what we need to do next, in the light of our
intentions and goals. Feedback is not the same as praise and
blame, rather it is precise information about where someone is
in relation to the goals they are trying to attain and what they
might do in the future to make progress towards those goals

 First, feedback should be timely (the longer we wait the less effect it
has on achievement).
Feedback should be specific (criterion-referenced) and corrective in
order to show what went well, what needs improvement, and how to
improve (all three components needed for maximum achievement).
Feedback can be verbal and written and can come from teachers,
peers, or the student him/herself. It should ask students to interpret
data and self-assess in the light of their goals and intentions, rather
than ask them to react to our interpretation.
Feedback should allow students to make decisions as to the nature of
the improvements and adjustments that need to be made. The great
inventor Thomas Edison had his own way of describing the
importance of feedback: Ive never made a mistake. Ive only
learned from experience.

 Summative assessment provides an accounting of

student progress at a particular point in time.
It is normally a measurement that describes where the
student stands in regard to some sort of standard such
as curriculum outcomes.
An end-of-unit test, for example, is designed to let
students know how well they have accomplished the
goals of the unit in terms of knowledge and skill
acquisition. The most familiar summative assessment is
the report card that communicates to students and their
parents the degree to which students are meeting
expectations with regard to the curriculum.

 summative assessments can be used in a formative

mannera report card might help students focus on
particular areas where they need extra workbut that is
not their primary intent.

Good summative assessments are:

Useful
Valid for your purposes
Reliable
Fair

Useful
The assessment must provide you with useful
information about student achievement in the course.
The assessment must be tied to the learning goals you
have and those learning goals must be important.
*If you assess unimportant or trivial concepts or just use
chapter tests without really looking at the items critically
in terms of whether they reect your teaching, what have
you learned about what your students know?

Valid for your purposes

The assessment must measure what it is supposed to measure.
For example, if you ask students to draw a map reecting the
change in U.S. borders from 1789-1820, you will need to
ensure that the assessment is scored based on students
understanding of the concepts not based on their ability to
draw.
As a teacher, taking a test yourself before giving it to your
students will help ensure that the items reect content you
actually taught. It will also help you to decide if there are some
aspects of the questions or layout that are content irrelevant,
representing extraneous hurdles for students that could be
simplified.

Reliable
Reliability has to do with the extent to which the score you give a
student on a particular assessment is inuenced by unsystematic
factors. These factors are things that can uctuate from one testing
or grading situation to the next or from one student to the next in
ways that are unrelated to students actual achievement level (e.g.,
luck in guessing the right answer, lack of time to complete the
assessment on a particular day, teacher bias or inconsistency in
scoring of essays across students or from one test to the next).
Thinking about how to reduce these factors such that the scores
given are likely to be the most accurate reection of students true
achievement levels on the task or test should be an ongoing
process for teachers.

Fair
The assessment must give the same chance of success
to all students. For example, a large project that is done
at home can be biased against low-income students,
favoring students whose parents have extra time to
help them over those whose parents need to work.

Figure 1. Assessment, evaluation, and student

improvement

Large-scale standardized assessments do not complete the cycle at the student level or
even at the school level, though they can offer useful feedback at the district level if
done well.

Validity and reliability

In order to overcome the limits and minimize the errors
in our assessments and evaluations, the assessment
tools we use must be valid and reliable.
Validity and reliability are terms usually associated with
standardized testing, but the underlying ideas are
important to assessment and evaluation more generally

 Validity simply means that the data collected is truly

related to the outcomes we intend to measure.
Reliable assessment instruments are ones that will
produce the same (or very similar) results in different
situations.

Two components in producing reliable instruments

1. The activity itself should produce clear, consistent
evidence of student achievement in the desired area.
For example, ambiguous test questions that can be read and
answered in many different ways are not particularly reliable
because they might produce very different responses from
students of similar ability in the same class. They cannot be
relied upon to provide a relatively objective sense of student
achievement.

2. The evidence should be interpreted the same way by

independent observers.
for example, reliability is demonstrated when qualified independent
markers reach similar conclusions about the quality of the work.
This kind of inter-rater reliability is achieved when both the
assignment and the criteria for success are clearly understood. In
standardized testing raters are trained in evaluating student work
so that grading is consistent and fair. This is not possible in
classroom situations but it is important that those involved
teachers, students, parents, and administratorsknow the criteria
for evaluation and can see they are being correctly and consistently
applied.

 It is important to remember that no single instrument,

no matter how carefully constructed, can collect all the
information needed for a comprehensive evaluation of
student progress or be completely valid and reliable.
The evaluation of student progress is a very complex
process and good teachers build a wide repertoire of
approaches to both collecting information and making
sense of it.

Reference:
Myers, John. Assessment and Evaluation in Social Studies Classrooms: A
Question of Balance in Challenges & Prospects for Canadian Social Studies.
Accessed from
http
://www.learnalberta.ca/content/ssass/html/pdf/assessment_and_evaluation_in_social
_studies_classrooms.pdf
last August 12, 2016
OFarrell, Ciara. Enhancing Student Learning through Assessment: A Toolkit
Approach. Accessed from
http://
www.tcd.ie/teaching-learning/academic-development/assets/pdf/250309_assessment_
toolkit.pdf
last August 13, 2016.