Assessment and learning: some reflections

Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 2017

Educational assessments define what aspects of learning will formally be given credit and therefore have a huge impact upon teaching and learning. Although the impact of high-stakes national and international assessments on teaching and learning is considered in the literature, remarkably, there is little research on the connection between theories of learning and educational assessments. Given the voluminous assessment that takes place annually in systematic ways in most many nations, it is surprising that more has not been gained from these assessments in the development of theories of learning and vice versa. In this article we consider both theories of learning and assessment and draw the main message of the article, that if assessments are to serve the goals of education, then theories of learning and assessment should be developing more closely with each other. We consider fundamental aspects of assessment theory, such as constructs, unidimensionality, invariance and quantifiability, and in doing so, we distinguish between educational and psychological assessment. Second, we show how less traditionally considered cases of a) international assessments and b) Assessment for Learning affect student learning. Through these cases we illustrate the otherwise somewhat theoretical discussion in the article. We argue that if assessment is to serve the learning goals of education, then this discussion on the relationship between assessment and learning should be developed further and be at the forefront of high-stakes, large-scale educational assessments.

2011

Our field has devised many terms to describe assessments in which examinees demonstrate some type of performance or create some type of product (e.g., performance, performancebased, “authentic,” constructed response, open-ended). Whatever you call them, performance-based assessments (PBAs) have a long history in educational measurement with cycles of ups and downs. And once again, PBAs are currently in vogue. Why? To address the federal government’s requirements for assessment systems that represent “the full performance continuum,” the two consortia formed in response to Race to the Top funding have both publicized assessment plans that involve a heavy dose of performance-based tasks (PARCC, 2010; SBAC, 2010). Thus, PBAs are relevant to any discussion about the future of testing in America.

Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 2017

For most of the considerable period of time during which they have been objects of scholarly study, learning and assessment have indeed, as the focal paper of this special issue of Assessment in Education argues, been 'fields apart' (Baird, Andrich, Hopfenbeck, & Stobart, 2017). It is certainly easy to generate plenty of plausible hypotheses about why this happened. While early attempts to measure human capabilities, such as the gruelling civil service examinations in fourteenth century China, did assess what candidates had learned, it was the level of achievement, rather than the process through which a candidate had developed, that was of primary interest. Centuries later, when Alfred Binet developed a series of tests of the achievement of schoolchildren, his focus was on determining which students might struggle in mainstream schools. Moreover, he was clear that this process of identification was simply to identify which students might need more help and which did not: The procedures which I have indicated will, if perfected, come to classify a person before or after such another person, or such another series of persons; but I do not believe that one may measure one of their intellectual aptitudes in the sense that one measures a length or a capacity. Thus, when a person studied can retain seven figures after a single audition, one can class him, from the point of view of his memory for figures, after the individual who retains eight figures under the same conditions and before those who retain six. It is a classification, not a measurement. (Binet, quoted in Varon, 1936, p. 41, my emphasis) Binet's ideas were brought to the United States by Henry Herbert Goddard, Director of Research at the New Jersey Training School in Vineland-a school for 'feeble-minded' students-and again, the focus was on classifying students. As Goddard himself remarked, ' A classification of our children based on the [Binet] Scale agreed with the Institution experience' (Goddard, 1916, p. 5). Binet, and to a lesser extent, Goddard, believed that ability might be increased through appropriate educational experiences, but they did not see the assessments as being in any way useful for determining the kinds of educational experiences that should be organised. The tests were useful in identifying students who needed help, and nothing more. Learning and assessment were treated as separate, unrelated processes. One involved filling learners' minds with content, while the other was simply a process of stocktaking. Other early researchers saw assessment and learning as separate, but for different reasons. Lewis Terman, who had been appointed to the post of Professor of Education at Stanford University in 1910, believed that ability was fixed, and innate. He was particularly concerned that since, at the time, the diagnosis of mental retardation was regarded as the prerogative of doctors rather than psychologists, a child would be unlikely to be diagnosed as retarded unless the retardation were severe. He saw in the Binet tests a way of identifying the abilities of individuals with much greater precision than had been possible beforehand; in particular, it would be possible to identify what he called 'higher-grade defectives' that doctors might miss. When the United States joined the Great War in 1917, Goddard and many of his colleagues were concerned that 'feeble-minded' soldiers might be easily tricked into letting enemy spies into a camp, and suggested stationing a 'psychological examiner' at every recruiting station (Goddard, 1917). Robert Yerkes, then president of the American Psychological Association, convened a group of mental testing experts, including Goddard and Terman, to plan how these examiners might be trained. However, at its first meeting, the group abandoned these plans

Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research & Perspective, 2003

2001). The committee issuing this report was charged with synthesizing advances in the cognitive sciences and measurement, and exploring their implications for improving educational assessment. The article opens with a vision for the future of educational assessment that represents a significant departure from the types of assessments typically available today, and from the ways in which such assessments are most commonly used. This vision is driven by an interpretation of what is both necessary and possible for educational assessment to positively impact student achievement. The argument is made that realizing this vision requires a fundamental rethinking of the foundations and principles guiding assessment design and use. These foundations and principles and their implications are then summarized in the remainder of the article. The argument is made that every assessment, regardless of its purpose, rests on three pillars: (1) a model of how students represent knowledge and develop competence in the subject domain, (2) tasks or situations that allow one to observe students' performance, and (3) interpretation methods for drawing inferences from the performance evidence collected. These three elements-cognition, observation, and interpretation-must be explicitly connected and designed as a coordinated whole. Section II summarizes research and theory on thinking and learning which should serve as the source of the cognition element of the assessment triangle. This large body of research suggests aspects of student achievement that one would want to make inferences about, and the types of observations, or tasks, that will provide evidence to support those inferences. Also described are significant advances in methods of educational measurement that make new approaches to assessment feasible. The argument is presented that measurement models, which are statistical exam-ples of the interpretation element of the assessment triangle, are cuuently available to support the kinds of inferences about student achievement that cognitive science suggests are important to pursue. Section III describes how the contemporary understanding of cognition and methods of measurement jointly provide a set of principles and methods for guiding the processes of assessment design and use. This section explores how the scientific foundations presented in Section II play out in the design of real assessment situations ranging from classroom to large-scale testing contexts. It also considers the role of technology in enhancing assessment design and use. Section IV presents a discussion of the research, development, policy, and practice issues that must be addressed for the field of assessment to move forward and achieve the vision described in Section I.

1972

2018

Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2012

It is sometimes said that there has been a 'paradigm shift' in the field of assessment over the last two or three decades: a new preoccupation with what learners can do, what they know or what they have achieved. It is suggested in this article that this change has precipitated a need to distinguish two conceptually and logically distinct methodological approaches to assessment that have hitherto gone unacknowledged. The upshot, it is argued, is that there appears to be a fundamental confusion at the heart of current policy, a confusion occasioned by the demand to know what learners know and compounded by a failure to recognise what this properly entails for assessment methodology.

Medical education, 2007

2000

The reasons for carrying out educational assessments can be grouped under three broad headings:

Higher Education Pedagogies

Assessment could demonstrate learning gains, but what is required for it to do so? Higher Education Pedagogies, 3 (1). pp. 54-56.