Chapter 5 – Deciding What to Assess and How to Assess It

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

Chapter 5 focuses on what a classroom teacher should be assessing as well as the procedures for properly assessing students. These questions should be guided by what information a teacher hopes to gather on students. Curricular standards should also play a role in assessment targets. Blooms Taxonomy is a helpful framework to decide cognitive outcomes from assessments and instruction. Deciding how to assess focuses on norm-referenced and criterion-referenced approaches. Selected response or constructed response type assessments are other considerations teachers should be aware of for assessing.
In this chapter we first focus is on what to assess. Decision-driven assessments help teachers gain information about their students. It is important to clarify, before an assessment is created, what decisions or decision will be influenced by a student’s performance on the assessment. Many times the knowledge and skills of the student are not the only expectation of the results. The attitudes toward what is being taught, as well as, effectiveness of instruction or need for further instruction are essential outcomes. By determining these things before the instruction and assessment a teacher can better inform instruction and assessment.
Curricular objectives also play a role in what to assess. Considering what your instructional objectives are can help you get a fix on what you should assess. In the past there was a demand for behavioral objectives. These objectives were sometimes too abundant and small-scoped which overwhelmed teachers. Today the goal is conceptualize curricular aims that are framed broadly and are measurable in order to organize instruction around them. The measurability is the key to starting good objectives. Even if they are broad, if they are measurable the can be managed by your instructional aims.
There are three potential assessment targets. The first is cognitive assessment which deals with students intellectual operations. These are the ability to display acquired knowledge or demonstrating thinking skills. The second target is affective assessment which deals with attitudes, interests, and values, like self-esteem, risk taking or attitude toward learning. The third target is psychomotor assessment targets which deal with a students’ large-muscle or small-muscle skills. These would be demonstrated in keyboarding skills or shooting a basketball in physical education. These ideas were presented by Benjamin Bloom through a classification system for educational objectives known as The 1956 Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.
The next area of focus is how to assess. There are two suggested strategies that are widely accepted. The first is norm-referenced measurement. In this strategy educators interpret a students performance in relation to the performance of students who have previously taken the same assessment. The previous group known is known as the norm group. The second strategy is criterion referenced strategy or criterion referenced interpretation. Criterion-referenced is an absolute interpretation as it hinges on the extent to which the curricular aim represented by the test are actually mastered by the student. The biggest differences in these approaches are how they are interpreted. Norm-referenced strategy should really only be used when a group of students need to be chosen for a specific educational experience. Otherwise, criterion referenced interpretations proved a much better idea of what students can and can not do, to allow teachers to make good instructional decisions.
Once teachers decide what to assess and then how to assess, the next thought should be how they will respond. There are really only two types of ways a student is able to respond, they are selected response and constructed response. Selected responses can be multiple choice or true or false type selections. Constructed response can be essay constructions, oral speeches, or product produced results. In deciding which type of response works best, scoring ease should not be a consideration. The assessment procedure used should focus on the student’s status in regards to an unobservable variable the teacher hopes to determine.
The more up-front thought a teacher gives to what to assess and how to assess the more likely they are to assess appropriately. Teachers need to be flexible and willing to change instruction based on assessment and strategies used to assess. By understanding instructional objectives and making them measurable assessments can be written to answer these questions for teachers and students.