Chapter 10 – Affective Assessments

Educational Assessment - Review By Brenda Roof
Classroom Assessment – What Teachers Need to Know - By W. James Popham

Chapter 10 discusses affect and its relevance as well as, the importance of assessing affect. The use of affective assessments could allow teachers to write goals and focus whole group instruction on students' affect, especially when individual students are not shifting their affective status, or for better monitoring and predicting of future behaviors. Likert inventories and Multifocus affective inventories are described. A five step process for creating Multifocus inventories is also discussed. Suggestions for when and how to assess are also presented.
The first question that is asked is why assess affect at all. Many teachers feel that they only need to address student’s skills and knowledge base. The idea of affect assessing is believed to be important and uninfluenced in the classroom. The author stresses however, that affect-variables are even more significant than cognitive variables or at leas as significant. Change in the belief that affect is not significant needs to occur. Many times teachers are totally unaware of a student’s attitude, interests and values. If a teacher were to become more aware of these things, especially in early years of education, they could have opportunities to better adjust a students affect toward instruction. By continually monitoring this from year to year students would be less likely to form negative attitudes and behaviors towards school. Especially of these attitudes can be detected and influenced more positively.
The other side of this argument points to vocal groups of people who only want traditional cognitive educations offered in public schools. The argument has been that affect should be the job of family and church. The problem with this entirely is the focus. There needs to be universal agreement to focus affect on specific areas. Specific areas, such as, “the promotion of students’ positive attitudes towards learning as an affective aspiration”. One would hope that everyone would agree to support affective learning. Therefore, it is very important to have a clear focus on affect and its relevance to learning.
There are some specific variables that could be assessed to promote affect universally. They are attitude, interests and values. Students who feel good about learning are more likely to continue to learn if learning is continued to be promoted. Some potential attitude focuses may be, positive attitudes; toward learning, toward self, toward self as a learner and toward those who differ from us. Another target would be student’s interests. Some interest targets might be subject-related interests, interest in reading and interest in emerging technologies. The third target would be values. While there are values some feel schools should have no part in, there are some that generally are non-controversial. Those values are honesty, integrity, justice and freedom. The goal would be to try not to assess too many variables but to target a few important ones to promote positive future affect in students.
There are a few different ways affect can be assessed in a classroom. The easier the ability to assess the more likely and successful a teacher will be as well. The best way to assess affect might be to ask students to complete a self-report inventory. An example of this type of affect assessment is a Likert inventory. Likert inventories are a series of statements that are responded to by agreement or disagreement. There are about eight steps in building a good Likert inventory. The first step is to choose the affective variable you want to assess. Determine which education variable to assess, an attitude, interest or value. Next generate a series of favorable or unfavorable statements regarding the affective variable. Try to use equal numbers of positive and negative statements. The third step is to get several people to classify each statement as positive or negative. Throw out any that aren’t agreed upon. The fourth step is to decide on the number and phrasing of the response options for each statement. Typically Likert scales uses five options, SD = strongly disagree, D = disagree, NS = not sure, A = agree, SA = strongly agree. Younger students may benefit from fewer choices. The fifth step is prepare the self-report inventory, giving students directions regarding how to respond and stipulating the inventory must be completed anonymously. Clear directions and general sample statement are important to producing good Likert assessments. The sixth step would be to administer the inventory either to your own students or if possible another set of students in a class that is not yours. Based on the responses you can make improvements before you administer to your students or the next time you administer to another group of your students. The seventh step is to score the inventories. Scoring should be clearly addressed in the directions and should conform to the number of responses. There should also be equal positive and negative distribution. An example of a scoring scenario could be, if there is a 5 choice response sequence; the SD and SA responses could be 5 points. Then lower as you move in D and A responses could be 3 points, and NS would be 0 points. The final and eighth step would be to identify and eliminate statements that fail to function in accord with the other statements. This can be done by completing a correlation coefficient. Remove statements that are not consistent in response and re-score the inventory without those responses. This process is referred to as Likerts criterion of internal consistency. Since there are many steps to the Likert inventories and that may be discouraging, a teacher could eliminate some steps.
A second type of inventory that focuses on collecting information about a number of students affective dispositions is a Multifocus affective inventory. Since Likert inventories focus on 10 to 20 items to a single affective area with fewer questions, Multifocus Affective Inventories can cover more areas. There are five steps to creating a Multifocus affective inventory. The first step is to select the affective variables to measure. Again here you will need to identify the educationally significant variables. The second step would be to determine how many items to allocate to each affective variable. The importance here is to include equal number of positive and negative responses. It is also recommended each item have two responses one positive and one negative. The more items the increments increase equally. The third step would be creating a series of positive and negative statements related to each affective variable. Statements need to be designed to elicit differential responses from students, but at the same time, the statements need to be scattered and not grouped together. The fourth step is to determine the number and phrasing of students’ response options. Traditional Likert responses can by used for Multifocus assessments as well. The fifth and final step would be to create clear directions for the inventory and an appropriate presentation format. It is important to include lucid directions about how to respond, at least one sample item, a request for anonymous, honest responses, and a reminder there is no right or wrong answers. These assessments are scored just like the Likert assessments. The Multifocus assessments purpose is to gather inferential data on student affect with fewer statements.
Affect can be assessed in systematic ways to allow a teacher to make instructional decisions about student’s current and future affect. Group focused inferences are the best way to use affective assessments. Individual inferences should be avoided. Attitudes, interests and values are variables that can be looked at universally for measuring affect. Self-report assessments such as Likert Inventories or Multifocus Inventories can created and used to assess affect.