ABCTE - Assessement

The Purpose of Assessment

A comprehensive assessment plan, whether for an individual teacher or for a school system, should include data that is relevant for each of the categories listed. Assessment is not just testing. Assessment is linked directly with instruction and is an integral component of a comprehensive educational master plan.

Criterion Referenced Assessments

A criterion-referenced assessment also allows the teacher to clearly define the objectives and goals for the students and create instructional ladders or steps for each student to reach those expectations. The teacher should make the goals as obvious as possible and note their importance. Teachers should also provide their students with an understanding of criterion-referenced tests if they are unaccustomed to taking them. Once the goal is clearly understood by the students, they can assist in the development and implementation of instructional activities. In essence, they will know where they are and where they have to be to reach mastery, so it becomes a matter of connecting the dots.

Formative Assessments

Another misconception about formative assessments is that they can stand alone and still provide an effective remedy for students' shortcomings. Arranging a formative assessment is merely one step in creating a comprehensive assessment-instruction system. Formative assessments work best when they are a natural outgrowth of classroom teaching and provide the teacher and student with renewed direction for continued growth. The teacher and student must analyze and understand the results before they can create or continue the pathway to mastery. A formative assessment without the supporting components becomes a summative test and loses the value unique to formatives.

Reworking on the board

Allowing students to rework problems or add to curricular concepts while at the front board is a popular event for the students. In most cases, students are happy to get out of their seat to perform a task. The fun and instruction are multiplied when the students get to orally share their ideas with the other students while referencing their board work. While this is a great way to measure students' understanding of the concepts being taught, this is also an easy method for the teacher to build student engagement.

Questioning

An informal, non-obtrusive method for determining if a student understands the instruction is to ask him or her a question. A proper questioning technique is a valuable, everyday strategy that is needed by every teacher. Good questions not only measure students' understanding, but they also promote student thinking. A good questioning technique will also inform the teacher about the pace of the lesson in reference to the level of student retention. You can review the first part of the Whole Group Strategies lesson in the Pedagogy and Instructional Design workshop for more detailed information about questioning and responding to students.

Ipsative Assessment

An ipsative assessment is a type of assessment in which the student is compared to his best previous attempt within the same curricular concepts. It is also known as a "profiling" type of test. Typically ipsative assessments draw characteristics from both summative and formative assessments. For instance, students may receive a grade for their efforts while the assessment yields data that is helpful in preparation for the next assessment over the same material, skill, or process.

Ipsative Assessment

Another consideration for the teacher is how to grade student effort on a series of ipsative assessments. Should the teacher count each one or wait until the student has reached his high mark and then count that one? The answer lies in how the teacher visualizes the ipsative assessment series. Are the assessments designed as practice (formative) or are they intended as a final measure of student performance (summative)? If formative, then the teacher may choose not to count some or all of the assessments. If summative, then the teacher will likely count all of them.

Formative Assessments

Effective feedback is one that connects the individual student with the exact area that needs improvement as well as those areas where the student is considered proficient. For instance, a teacher may inform a student that he performed well on the last arithmetic practice test and showed that he has mastered adding single column numbers, but that he needs to develop a plan to improve his ability to subtract single column numbers.

Essay or constructed response

Most students think essay-type questions are the most difficult because the student has to generate the correct answer since it is not given somewhere in the question stem. Essays and constructed responses are considered subjective assessments because there is more than one correct answer or more than one way to express the correct answer. They require students to think through their answer and perhaps write a rough draft before writing a final draft. Students are often prompted to study more in preparation for an essay-type exam.

Projects

Projects allow students a degree of freedom in investigating, compiling, and displaying a particular topic in a style that represents a personal flair. Teachers establish the boundaries for the project, such as the curricular goal, due date, extent of research, and allowable materials. Then the students are free to construct their project within these parameters. Projects are a great way to allow students to pursue their personal interests within the umbrella of a curricular topic. Often students engage their topic in far greater detail than what is required by the curriculum and may develop a particular interest for that subject area. Projects allow the teacher to measure learning at a greater depth, through a variety of modalities, and over a greater curricular expanse.

Ipsative Assessment

There are situations in which ipsative assessments may not be practical nor make good instructional practice. By definition, ipsative events are somewhat personal because they compare a student to himself. Therefore it is not a standard procedure to compare the results of different students. In this sense an ipsative assessment is like a cross country runner who runs every race to beat her own previous best time.

Selected response

•Distractors (meaning the wrong answer choices) can be worded to indicate the students' misconceptions. This can help teachers determine if a particular concept is well understood and isolate any areas or concepts that may be confusing or troublesome for the students. •Multiple choice short quizzes make good formative assessments to quickly determine if the students are progressing at an acceptable level.

Summative Assessments

•Each summative assessment should target the teacher's instructional objectives which are based on the approved curriculum. •When planning a unit or sequence of lessons, the teacher should determine when a summative assessment is most appropriate and what it should measure.

Performance Assessments

•Knowing how to use rubrics and holistic scoring prior to the event. Often a team of teachers will score a common assessment in a round-table format so that they have the opportunity to discuss borderline student answers and create a continually-refined and common understanding as the process unfolds. In addition, anchor papers or exemplary models are needed to help standardize the inter-rater reliability and scoring consistency if multiple teachers are scoring the same assessment.

What is Assessment

•how well the students are learning and how well the teacher is teaching •student, teacher, parent, and institutional accountability •a method to analyze and improve teaching and learning •a means to motivate students •a range of options for teachers to use that vary greatly from recording anecdotal notes while observing a student to administering a standardized test

What is Assessment

•information gathering •the process of documenting knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs •the process of determining whether or not clearly defined learning objectives have been achieved by students •a measure of students' knowledge and skills compared against some level of desired performance, such as attaining the level of proficient or distinguished or simply meeting the standard

Criterion Referenced Assessments

A criterion-referenced assessment is one that measures students' success in reference to defined standards, or criteria. A criterion-referenced test is typically utilized in the classroom to determine how well students have mastered a particular curricular unit or standard and the students' scores will reflect their level of mastery. The results of a criterion-referenced assessment are not determined by how well a student scored in relation to the other students taking the same exam. However, criterion-referenced assessment may be used to compare students' results by criterion if they completed the same exam, such as a statewide exam in a particular subject area.

Diagnostic Assessments

A diagnostic assessment is one that looks back on prior student learning and provides data that connects to new learning. A diagnostic assessment allows a teacher to make judgments regarding how well a student is performing or is likely to perform on a particular curricular topic. Diagnostic assessments are useful to ascertain each student's strengths, weaknesses, knowledge, and skills prior to instruction of that curricular sequence. Once the data is available the teachers can then remediate students and/or adjust the instructional sequence to meet the specified needs of each student. The data from a diagnostic assessment can also be used to create an instructional target or goal for the students.

Flash cards

A flash card is a writable surface with a question on one side and the answer on the other side. The teacher can used them in small or large group settings or can allow pairs of students to use them to quiz each other. The length of this activity can vary as the time and circumstances permit. Flash cards are very valuable because the students can immediately see the results and receive feedback.

Lab sets or ordered sets

A lab set (which is also known as an ordered set or a problem set) is a series of questions based upon and related to a single stimulus. The types of stimuli vary but generally fall into one of the following categories: mathematical solutions, technical reading passages, graphics or illustrations, or processes or experiments. For instance, a student may be required to read a narrative that describes a laboratory investigation. The questions that follow may ask the students to identify the purpose, the independent variable, the control, all sources of error, and predict the type of graph needed to correctly display the data while using the information from the passage. Typically lab sets are used by science and mathematics teachers although their usefulness should extend into other disciplines.

Norm Referenced Assessments

A norm-referenced assessment, which is also known as a cohort-referenced assessment, does not measure student success against a defined standard or criteria, but against the achievement of the other students who took the test. This is also known as "grading on the curve" or "curving" the test results. When curving the test results, the top scoring students always get an "A" (or some other indication of a high mark) and the rest of the students receive scores based on how well they scored on the assessment relative to the top scoring students. That way, no matter how well or poorly the students demonstrated achievement, a set number or percentage of the students, such as 15% of the class, will always score an "A," a set number or percentage will receive a "B," and so on. Thus, the results of norm-referenced assessments rank students in comparison to other students who took the same test. The IQ test is one of the best known norm-referenced assessments.

Performance Assessments

A performance assessment consists of two parts, an authentic task and a rubric, or scoring criteria. To construct a performance assessment, the teacher identifies a well-defined task that requires the students to create, make, or do something that is within the intent of the curriculum and normal classroom instruction. The teacher then creates a holistic set of scoring criteria or a rubric that is based on curricular standards. This is used so that students' responses are assessed using the approved curriculum and the common classroom procedures.

Performance Assessments

A performance based assessment, which may also be referred to as an authentic or alternative assessment, is a form of testing where the assessment is not a traditional paper and pencil test, but rather an exhibition of skills. The tasks are typically based on real-life (authentic) scenarios or are career-specific, and require the application of the requisite skills and knowledge for that task. Performance assessments are popular because the students can actively demonstrate what they know rather than select an answer from a given list. Therefore, performance assessments can feel like a truer indicator of the student's actual knowledge and ability level than more traditional tests.

Portfolios

A portfolio is a purposeful selection of student work that exhibits the student's effort, progress and achievements in a curricular area. The portfolio is personalized for each student and is designed to portray the student within the confines of the curriculum. When using the portfolio technique, teachers should clearly explain the purpose of the portfolio and inform the students if a particular event may be included in their personalized portfolio. Students should be encouraged to be invested in the process and participate in the selection of the portfolio's contents.

The Purpose of Assessment

Assessments help turn the act of presenting information into the science of teaching by creating the feedback loop that connects purposeful instruction to student learning. Teaching and the subsequent assessments are reciprocal in that one affects the other. Effective teachers constantly move between assessment and instruction during their normal teaching sequence. Teachers that integrate the various types of assessment into their instruction to create a comprehensive assessment-instruction system are more successful than teachers who plan blindly and move forward with a lack of supporting data.

Diagnostic Assessments

Consider the situation where a bright student is penalized because of a low diagnostic test score because he came from a feeder school that did not emphasize that part of the curriculum. Try to avoid labeling students based only on diagnostic exam results. Tests created by the teacher may be better than the tests created by outside vendors, but teachers are advised to create a historical record of proven results before heavily weighting the diagnostic data while making critical judgments.

Diagnostic Assessments

Diagnostic assessments are similar to summative assessments in that they are both formal and identify students' achievement in reference to pre-determined standards. Like formative assessments they presume that an instructional component will connect the needs identified by the assessments with future student growth. In other words, the teacher is expected to adjust lesson components and differentiate lessons as needed in response to the data generated by these assessments. Diagnostic assessments are unique in that they can be used to track student performance, evaluate curriculum, and measure the effectiveness of value-added components in a non-summative manner.

Thumbs

During a lesson the teacher may ask the student to signify if they know the answer, understand a concept or agree with an opinion or statement. One method is to have the students signal "thumbs up" if they know or agree,"thumbs down" if they do not know or disagree, and "thumbs sideways" if they are neutral or not sure. The resulting information is immediate and usually truthful. Variations of this strategy are stop/go cards or red/green colors. This technique is not disruptive to the flow of a lesson and provides useful and immediate feedback from all of the students.

Formative Assessments

During formative assessments, the teacher's role changes so that the teacher works more closely with individual students to construct lessons targeting their areas of need based on the data generated by the formative assessment. To get to that point, the teacher determines appropriate locations for formative assessments and then allocates time for them within the lesson plan. Based on the results of the formative assessments, the teacher may differentiate his or her approach among the students by selecting new or advanced learning opportunities for certain students and re-teaching some material using a new strategy for other students. The teacher may also decide to use additional formative assessments to monitor the growth of the entire class.

Exit slips

Exit slips or tickets are small pieces of paper that the students give to the teacher as they exit the room or after a particular unit of study. The exit slips are designed to give the teacher a snapshot of how much the students learned as a result of the instruction. Although this technique does require the teacher to collect and analyze the data, the responses tend to be truthful and insightful, especially if they are anonymously received.

Formative Assessments

Finally, teachers sometimes express reluctance to use formative assessments because they feel they are losing control of the instructional delivery system. For instance, whenever a student is allowed to self-assess or a peer is allowed to review a formative assessment and provide instructional feedback, the teacher is left out of the loop. Yes, this is true. It is also a good thing. The teacher retains control of the overall direction, monitors student achievement, and advances learning by empowering the learner.

Formative Assessments

Formative assessments are a common form of measurement and are based on the "formation" of a concept. In the simplest terms, a formative assessment includes student practice with constructive feedback and leads to more personalized student practice followed by more personalized feedback. The loop continues until the desired level of student mastery is reached. The feedback provided by formative assessments is designed to help students become aware of any gaps between their current knowledge and their educational goals. Effective feedback also helps students develop a plan to reach their goals and can eliminate students' errors before they can become habitual.

Formative Assessments

Formative assessments can also be defined as the diagnostic use of assessments to provide feedback to teachers and students for the purpose of providing better instruction so that individual students may reach proficiency. Therefore, formative assessments are goal-directed, linked with instruction, and are typically embedded as part of a sequence of lessons. Classroom examples of formative assessments include anecdotal records, practice tests, classwork, and self-reflection activities. Since a formative assessment is considered practice, teachers do not necessarily count them for grading purposes.

Piggyback

In simplest terms, a piggyback occurs when the teacher asks the students to create or expand on an answer based on the previous response of another student. For instance, the teacher asks an open-ended question. Once a student response is received, the teacher calls upon another student to add to or continue that response. The process repeats until the topic is covered.

Ipsative Assessment

Ipsative assessments have several characteristics that make them unique and particularly useful to the classroom teacher. One of the benefits of ipsative assessments is the ease by which the students are able to compare their results with their existing "personal best" within that domain. This unique feature promotes ipsative referencing as a type of self-reflection in which the interpretation of the data is done by the student. Teachers also use ipsative assessments as practice events leading to a demonstration of mastery. This instructional approach is useful as long as the student is making satisfactory progress and consistently surpassing his previous personal best performance.

Ipsative Assessment

Ipsative type assessments can be used to motivate and challenge a student to continue to improve. This type of self-competition removes excessive peer pressure and is especially successful with reluctant learners and students with learning disabilities. Another related benefit occurs when the student analyzes his own progress and sets realistic goals and steps for achieving those goals. As a result, student self-determination is escalated. As students become more aware of their own progress and learning styles, they can self-diagnose and provide a personalized plan for reaching or exceeding personal and curricular expectations.

Matching

Matching type questions are objective assessments that require a student to correctly identify, link, or "match" the relationship between two items. Typically matching questions provide two sets of items for the students to analyze. Virtually any items can be used to create a matching question, but typical examples include vocabulary words and definitions, cause and effect relationships, tools/instruments and their uses, or dates and events. Matching questions are able to cover expansive amounts of curriculum while minimizing students' ability to guess correctly compared to traditional multiple choice questions. The likelihood of guessing a correct answer is decreased as the length of the item sets increases. It can be further decreased when one of the item sets is larger than the other or by allowing answers to be used more than once. Therefore, the students cannot better their chances just by eliminating possible answers from the answer pool.

Open book

Most students love the thought of an open book test until they have to take one. An open book test is one where the teacher allows the students to use their textbook and often any notes or other resources during a test. Typically students assume that they will be able to look up every answer and receive a mastery score for their efforts. Because of this, students often spend their time searching and marking the location of vocabulary words and other curricular topics in the textbook as opposed to actually learning them. On test day, those students who know the material tend to do much better than those students who have to look up every or most of the questions because their time is up before they are able to complete the task.

Oral exams

Oral exams have long been the domain of foreign language and reading teachers, but should be considered as an option for almost all subject areas. If a teacher wants to know how much or to what extent a student understands a curricular topic, one of the best ways is to ask the student directly. This may be as informal as a question in class or a more formal arrangement where the questions are prepared in advance and may require models to successfully respond to the exam. The teacher also has the opportunity to ask follow-up questions to pursue answers to a deeper level and to clarify student thinking.

Paired testing

Paired testing is a way to allow a pair of students to collaborate on an assessment event. The teacher may select the pairs or allow the students to self-select their pairings to maximize their effectiveness. Upon completion, the pair submits one answer form that represents the work of both students. Therefore, one of the obvious benefits is that the amount of scoring the teacher has to complete is divided in half. Another benefit is the collaborative nature of the assignment, especially if it is a criterion-referenced event.

Performance Assessments

Performance assessments open a vast array of assessment types for use by the teacher. For instance, performance tasks may include open-ended questions, hands-on problem solving, cartoons, experiments, inventions, musical compositions, original plays, stories, dances, essays, and story illustrations. In certain classes, performance assessments are also called lab practicums because the students are required to demonstrate how to correctly use the equipment specific to that program.

Norm Referenced Assessments

Recently norm-referenced tests have received criticism. By definition, a norm-referenced assessment does not measure achievement with respect to a standard, so the assessment is seldom linked to lesson planning or mastery learning. Teachers can curve a benchmark test showing how well the class is progressing and, after the test, the teacher can begin the next unit of study regardless of how well the students performed. With norm-referenced tests, it is not uncommon to find that students will be unwilling to work together or cooperate to help other students learn. From a student's perspective, it may seem disadvantageous to help another student in the same cohort. This type of behavior is obviously not very helpful in promoting the overall success of the class. In response to No Child Left Behind and high stakes testing, teachers have moved away from a reliance on norm-referenced tests. With the loss of the protective umbrella provided by norm-referenced tests, teachers and schools have developed better pedagogy to differentiate instruction so that all students can learn.

Selected response

Selected response (also known as multiple choice) questions are among the most common question or item types. A selected response question asks the students to select the correct answer from a series of possible correct answers in response to an introductory statement, which is also called a stem. Typically the students are confronted with four or five possible answers and their task is to select the correct one instead of having to generate a response from memory. Selected response questions are considered objective assessments because there is only one correct answer.

Recitation

Similar to an oral exam, recitation is a type of discourse where the teacher asks questions, the students respond, and the teacher judges the quality of their answers. While this is typical in most traditional classrooms, recitation is a quick way to determine if the students understand a topic.

Summative Assessments

Summative assessments are also means of accountability. They are often used to hold teachers and schools accountable for their students' learning. In these situations, certain summative assessments can cause more anxiety for teachers and principals than it does for their students. This is magnified by the fact that the results of these assessments are routinely published in the local media for the community. For better or worse, it is not unusual for the student achievement data from a high stakes summative assessments to cause a principal to be transferred to a different assignment or a teacher to be reassigned to teach a subject that is not required to undergo high stakes testing. The same type of data may also be used to measure the effectiveness of an instructional or curriculum department within a school or district.

Take home

Take home tests offer a unique characteristic in assessing students because they allow the students the freedom of unlimited resources, outside help, and a lengthened time frame for completing an answer. In the simplest form, a take-home exam is one where the teacher creates an assessment and then allows the students to work on solving the problem for an predetermined amount of time outside of class. The students are then free to work together, draw upon professional expertise, and think creatively. Of course, the teacher knows this in advance and expects each student to complete the task at a mastery level. A variation on this question type is to require the students to complete several questions as a take-home event and then the teacher selects one question as an in-class assessment.

Performance Assessments

Teachers also tend to feel that the data collected from a performance task is more representative of the students' true knowledge. There is rarely a way that students can guess the correct answer using a performance assessment and all of the information must typically be generated by the student. In this way, they separate those students who have studied and prepared for the event from those who may have taken shortcuts. Performance assessments differ from most other assessments because they allow great student freedom in constructing responses that require higher order and/or analytical thinking. Students will generally respond more creatively with greater depth and detail when they are not limited by a prompt. Another value of performance assessments is that they can be collected over time as evidence of the growth, mastery or achievement of curricular goals.

Ipsative Assessment

Teachers must also remain vigilant regarding the pacing of the lessons. Excessive use of ipsative assessments may consume a large amount of time that will be needed later to complete the entire curriculum. There may be some situations whereby certain students increase their achievement at such a slow pace that the time available will run out before they have maximized their opportunity. To guard against this, the teacher is advised to determine the length of time available for teaching a particular concept and then plan ipsative assessments within that time constraint. Additional instructional initiatives may be necessary to extend the learning time for students who are unable to meet the pacing demands of the curriculum.

Norm Referenced Assessments

Teachers use norm-referenced tests because of several unique benefits. First, norm-referenced tests are considered more fair or compassionate because they guarantee that a prescribed number of students will be successful regardless of the ability of the students, teacher or institution. It is well known that students and parents of students who score well in a particular class will have very few negative comments to make. Thus, curving scores can minimize problems for the teacher. Norm-referenced tests are also useful whenever the teacher wants the students to understand how their scores compared to the remainder of the cohort who took the same assessment. In some cases, this is very motivational for the students. The teacher can also use a series of norm-referenced tests to move students toward a standard in such a way that the students do not feel hopeless or defeated based on the results of the test.

Performance Assessments

The best performance tasks allow the students to apply an array of curriculum-related skills and knowledge in a creative manner that is a personalized response to the assessment. This also assumes that there are multiple methods for defining a correct answer. The teacher might also design the assessment so that students search out additional facts or information or try novel approaches to elaborate or extend an answer. It is important for the teacher to do a final review of the task design before asking the students to begin working. The final review must include a thorough analysis to prevent technical constraints and/or equity issues and bias. The task must be fair to all students. Then teachers with training in holistic rubric scoring judge the quality of the students' work based on the established standards. Well constructed performance tasks appear more like a normal classroom activity than a test. Tasks that are embedded into and align with the intent of the curriculum demonstrate the assessment-instruction feedback loop.

Interview

The interview format is designed as an ice-breaker and provides an opportunity for the teacher and students to get to know each other. This is especially useful in the beginning of the school year and as an introduction into oral assessments. Teachers can also interview students as a variation of the oral exam strategy or students can interview each other as a formative assessment to help guide their study efforts.

Minute Paper

The minute paper is a brief three to five sentence narrative that the students write to the teacher. This activity can be implemented at any time during a lesson, depending upon the type of information the teacher is requesting. Typically minute papers are a personal essay to the teacher which indicates what the students have learned as a result of the lesson and identifies any remaining trouble areas. Minute papers are effective because they require the students to write about their own personal thoughts, ideas and reflections.

Round robin responses

The round robin responses technique requires the students to think creatively and provides feedback to the teacher regarding the achievement level of the students. In this strategy, the teacher provides the initial stimulus such as a question and then facilitates and monitors the flow of student answers. In round robin responses, students provide answers in an organized manner so that all students have the opportunity to respond in order before a student is required to provide a second response.

Formative Assessments

The students' role morphs into one where they become more involved with their own learning. Since they are able to analyze the results of their own formative assessments, they can and should have a voice in what steps are necessary for their continued development. It is helpful if the students are able to see a model or an example of the completed product or the desired level of mastery so they can visualize the pathway that links their current level to the desired level. As the students become more proficient in analyzing their own situation and constructing bridges to their desired goal, they will be gaining valuable maturity which will help them to assume even greater control over their own destiny. When student are more involved with their own learning, they are more apt to learn from their mistakes and realize ways to do it better next time. These lessons may even be greater than the content they are trying to master.

Diagnostic Assessments

The usefulness of diagnostic data is magnified if it becomes incorporated into a historical measure of student performance over time. Schools that utilize a comprehensive assessment-instruction system maintain diagnostic records for every student for the entire time the student is in that school and school system. As diagnostic data becomes more reliable and precise, the principal or teachers may decide that the results indicate that a class reorganization may be helpful with an accompanying redeployment of staff.

Performance Assessments

There are many instructionally significant reasons to implement performance assessments as part of the assessment-instruction system. Performance assessments tend to engage the students more than traditional paper and pencil tests. As a result, the students are more diligent and show greater motivation in their preparation. Likewise, the lesson planning that leads to a performance exam tends to involve more active learning than the lecture and review type of lesson that is used to prepare students for other types of tests. Students that are actively engaged in learning tend to be more interested and motivated than students who have a more passive learning experience.

Criterion Referenced Assessments

There are several instructional advantages afforded by criterion-referenced exams that teachers can utilize to maximize their benefits. First, since the students are working to accomplish mastery of a criterion and not working against each other, the students can work in teams, or the teacher can form cooperative groups. A lack of competition between students presents an opportunity for the students to work and study together for the benefit of everyone.

Diagnostic Assessments

Thoughtful answers to these questions may determine where and when a diagnostic assessment would be most advantageous in the lesson sequence. The answers may also indicate that the school or class may not have the infrastructure in place to support such an initiative. Fortunately, in a number of schools, diagnostic exams are currently available that have a proven track record and are a useful addition to the overall instructional scheme. When these are absent, the teacher may wish to survey the plethora of existing vendors for a useful tool. An internet search will reveal many proprietary tests to assess virtually any skill or content area. When all else fails, the teacher may have to construct the diagnostic assessment.

Summative Assessments

To use a more sophisticated definition, summative assessments are tests that are designed to measure a learner's understanding following a sustained period of instruction with a focus on identifying the level of mastery and the effectiveness of the instruction.

True or false

True or false questions are a common type of question. A question of this type is one in which the student is required to determine whether the question stem or statement is a falsification or not. Like multiple choice questions, true or false questions are also considered objective assessments because there is only one correct answer. This type of exam is not considered very reliable or informative since the students have a 50-50 chance of guessing the correct answer. In some cases, the degree of effectiveness can be increased by asking the students to make each false statement into a correct statement or by having the student write an explanation for each answer for why the question is true or false.

Summative Assessments

When the average person thinks of a test in school, they are typically recalling a summative assessment. These assessments are content-driven and appear as tests, quizzes, reports, papers, recitals, and competitions. Summative assessments are designed to add up or "sum" the amount of knowledge that the test-taker demonstrates. They are considered "assessments of learning." For teachers, the summative assessment is usually given at the end of a unit of study, such as a chapter, semester, or year, for the purpose of student evaluation and assigning a grade.

Formative Assessments

When used properly, formative assessments can develop into a self-reflective process for students that encourages their involvement, especially when the feedback from learning activities is actually used to adapt the instruction to meet the learners' needs. Formative assessments promote student learning and in particular, deep learning. As such, they are intertwined with instructional pedagogy.

Diagnostic Assessments

When using diagnostic exams, it is important to understand their limitations. First of all, the teacher should clearly identify what is to be measured and make sure that the selected assessment is designed to measure that factor. Often diagnostic tests are given as a pre-test for a curricular unit to determine the entry level knowledge and establish baseline data about the students for measuring their growth. The information gained can become a baseline only if the diagnostic exam is a true representation of future learning. Little useful information is gained if the test is invalid, biased, or inconsistent with curricular intentions. Analyzing and acting on poor data can make a bad situation worse.

Formative Assessments

When using formative assessments, both the teacher and students become consumers of the data generated by the event. Within that relationship, an interesting instructional association should develop where the teacher and students share the responsibility for learning to a greater extent than traditional models have allowed. When students do take partial responsibility, this present an opportunity for the teacher to become more of a facilitator of learning rather than just a provider.

Formative Assessments

While formative assessments are great tools, there are several ways that teachers commonly misuse them. Probably the most common is to weight a student's grade with data primarily from formative assessments. Formative assessments are a form of practice. Whereas a teacher may be able to derive a score from a formative assessment, it should not be considered in the same manner as a score from a summative assessment. Scoring practice events would be similar to assessing a baby's ability to walk based on her first shaky steps. Although success comes in time, the first several attempts are not going to be confident and polished...and there may even be a few falls.

Formative Assessments

Yet another misuse of formative assessments is when teachers rely too heavily on them. It is a good idea to provide frequent formative assessments to help guide instruction. However, a formative followed by another formative is like measuring the measuring. It does not allow for the students to receive appropriate instruction before the next assessment. Once an instructional scheme has been developed based on the data generated from a formative assessment, a student must engage in learning before it is practical to measure if the student has learned anything.

Portfolios

•Portfolios are designed so that the teacher is able to work directly with the students. This attribute promotes discussion and increases student-teacher interaction. •They are effective at displaying student growth over time. This allows the classroom teacher and other interested parties to make decisions based on a history of evidence. •They allow students to recognize their own growth. •They empower students to assume greater responsibility for their own learning which is often a motivator for reluctant learners. •Portfolios allow the teacher to assess the students using a variety of techniques and formats, including performances and open-ended problem solving strategies. •They are often considered to be a more representative sample of the students' true level of achievement for a particular area.

Performance Assessments

•Some students may not score well because they are not accustomed to a performance assessment. Students might not know what to expect and will not adequately prepare for the activity. In cases like this, the students may feel the tasks are unfair. To prevent this, teachers are advised to keep their instruction and performance assessments similar and to communicate that similarity to the students. It is also a good idea to inform the students ahead of time as to what the task entails and explain the standards that will be used to evaluate their performance. This will require a careful description of the elements that will be expected for a proficient response.

Types of Assessments

•Summative •Formative •Ipsative •Diagnostic •Performance/authentic •Criterion-referenced •Norm-referenced

Summative Assessments

•Summative assessments should be comprehensive and representative measures of overall knowledge, skills, and/or performance. They are most accurate when they aggregate data from a number of different sources. For instance, relying on one test to determine a student's grade for the year would be unprofessional. A wise teacher amasses data throughout the learning cycle such as from quizzes, unit tests and competitive performances, to determine the grade for a particular child. •When using multiple sources of assessments to determine grades, the teacher should predetermine the weighting of each assessment before instruction begins. The weighting of each particular component should reflect established curricular priorities.

Selected response

•Teachers can include a range of questions that assess an entire curricular unit in both a summative and formative style. •Teachers can minimize the disadvantage felt by poor readers or non-English speaking students by adjusting the question stem.

Performance Assessments

•The amount of time required to complete the testing sequence. Although traditional tests can usually be completed during the time allotted for a normal class session, more elaborate tasks may require multiple sessions. •The amount of time need to score the tasks. It will most likely require a lot more time to score a performance assessment than just running a set of answer sheets through the scanner. In some cases, the scoring will take significantly longer than the actual assessment. When this happens, providing the students with immediate and informative feedback is not realistic.

Formative Assessments

•The instructional expectations must be based on the approved curriculum. •The teacher must identify and share the achievement goals with the students in a way that they will understand. It is also helpful to provide examples of exemplary student work as a model or thought-starter. •When employing direct instruction, teachers should include a series of guided practice events with informative feedback as a formative assessment of that instruction. •Within a series of formative assessments, the teacher can choose to have the students complete several self-assessments as part of the series.

Summative Assessments

•The teacher should create the assessment before beginning instruction for that unit of learning. Creating the assessment first provides a more unbiased assessment of the students' knowledge. When a teacher creates a test after the instruction, it is sometimes difficult for the teacher to resist the temptation to de-emphasize a section of the curriculum because the students might not perform well on that section. As a result, the scores are higher than they should have been and the attention is not drawn to any areas where the students may need extra help. Another reason to create the assessment before beginning instruction is to guide the teacher's planning for that unit. This is particularly helpful in terms of pacing the lesson and determining the depth of coverage.

Selected response

•They are easy to score. Multiple choice questions have become very popular because of the proliferation of machine scoring. Computer scoring also allows for an advanced statistical analysis of the data. This type of analysis will indicate areas of students' strengths and weaknesses as well as provide an item analysis for each question. •Teachers can create different degrees of difficulty. For instance, the teacher can include simple recall or memorization questions while also including more difficult questions that require a synthesis or evaluation of facts or details.

The Purpose of Assessment

•To identify the whole group's and individual student's strengths and weaknesses with respect to the curriculum so that the teacher can have access to the best information before making any instructional decisions •To inform parents and guardians about their children so they can help them and make informed decisions as to their future •To show students their progress toward mastery so individual students can become more aware, self-directed, and motivated in their approach to their own learning •To promote the concept of cyclic and continual student learning as exemplified by the model: assessment → instruction → assessment → instruction → assessment.... •To evaluate the effectiveness of the instructional implementation of specific curricular units, educational initiatives, teachers, or schools •To present personalized student data so that the teacher or institution can give a grade that is linked with an award, such as a degree, license, or certificate