Assessment
Assessment is an umbrella term that refers to the entire process of collecting information and making judgments about instructional outcomes. It helps teachers decide what is working and what is not. Preassessment provides insight into what students already know, and don't know, before beginning instruction. Preassessment might be formal, such as a pretest of course-related knowledge and/or skills, informal, such as observation of attitudes and anxieties about the area of study that students express, or a combination of the two. It is intended to allow teachers to better tailor instructional objectives and strategies to individual students or to a particular group of students. Formative assessment occurs during the process of instruction, providing periodic information on what students have learned and what remains to be learned. Formative assessment can also tap students' affective responses to the instructional process -- what makes them happy or excited or comfortable and what does not. Given this kind of information, which can also be solicited in either formal or informal ways, teachers can make procedural adjustments that maximize the likelihood of achieving cognitive, psychomotor, and affective objectives before the unit, course, or the year is over. Summative assessment occurs at the end of a course of study. In mastery learning, it is the certification that an objective or objectives have been
mastered. In traditional systems, it includes the determination of grades. In instructional planning terms, it is a look back over the whole process and asking "how did I do?"
Measurement
Measurement refers to decisions about how the achievement of objectives will be operationalized or quantified. In writing complete instructional objectives, a process which has been discussed in a previous chapter, it is the part of the statement that specifies the evidence that will be used to determine whether or not the goal has been accomplished. Testing is one kind of measurement, and usually refers to students' opportunity to respond to an identical set of questions under controlled conditions. Effective assessment measures should be both valid and reliable.
A valid measure is one that reflects what it claims to reflect. For a test to be a valid measure of students' mastery of a set of objectives, it should include representative questions for all the objectives, not be concentrated on one or two of them. A valid measure of whether or not students have been successful at learning how to play the piano would by necessity include their demonstration of performance skills, since even correctly answering 100 percent of a set of questions about how to play the piano will not be a valid indicator that a student can actually do it. Determining the validity of measures of affective outcomes is sometimes less clear-cut than measuring objectives in the other learning domains; however, if one of a teacher's goals is to increase students' joy of reading, it is important to think about whether their checking out more books from the library is a valid reflection of their enjoying reading books or if it in fact reflects their getting points toward their grade for each book read.
A reliable measure is one which is accurate and consistent. Three typical ways of assessing the reliability of paper-and-pencil tests are the test-retest method, the equivalent forms method, and the split-half method. In the first instance, if giving the same test to the same group of students within a short period of time results in similar scores, the test is judged to be reliable. In the second instance, if two equivalent forms of a test are developed, covering the same material, reliability can be determined by comparing the scores on the two forms. In the third instance, the scores for even-numbered and odd-numbered items on longer tests can be compared to one another to indicate whether they provide a consistent profile of student mastery. Assessing the rating reliability on essay tests, project reports, and performances is more challenging. Teachers might occasionally want to put aside a set of graded papers and reread them at a later time (without referring to the previously recorded grade) to see whether their judgments are consistent. They
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might also consider comparing their assessments with those of other raters, including students, to see whether there is inter-rater agreement as to whether or not the assignment met its objectives.
Evaluation
Evaluation is a judgment of merit or worth, often communicated via grading. Assessment is not necessarily evaluative, nor does it necessarily have to lead to an ultimate grade. Even when a test or assignment is evaluated as to its relative worth (that is, students are given a report of how well they did), the evaluative information should be accompanied by descriptive information which tells students what they did, or are doing, well and not so well, and how they can do better. In addition, it is often appropriate to provide descriptive feedback without tacking on an evaluative assessment. The next two sections of this chapter will deal with these two kinds of information provided by assessment-based feedback.