MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION
A report on:
IMPORTANCE AND FUNCTIONS OF TEST IN EDUCATION
Introduction
Educational assessment typically is initiated when a student has difficulty
meeting expectations for academic performance. There are many standardized tests
and procedures that can be used to identify a student’s academic strengths and
limitations, as well as his or her competence in domains that contribute to academic
achievement, such as language and cognition. However, school professionals recognize
that effective school performance also depends on a student’s ability to perform a
variety of functional tasks that enable him or her to participate in the various learning
activities of the school day. These functional tasks are often referred to as nonacademic
tasks. Students with disabilities often have difficulty meeting performance expectations
on these tasks because of limitations resulting from their physical or cognitive
impairments. Therefore, performance on nonacademic tasks needs to be included in an
assessment of a student’s educational difficulties. In many situations, efforts to
minimize or compensate for these functional limitations may be a central focus of the
student’s special education program.
Why is Assessment Important?
Assessment is important because of all the decisions you will make about
children when teaching and caring for them. The decisions facing our three teachers at
the beginning of this chapter all involve how best to educate children. Like them, you
will be called upon every day to make decisions before, during, and after your teaching.
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Whereas some of these decisions will seem small and inconsequential, others will
be “high stakes,” influencing the life course of children. All of your assessment decisions
taken as a whole will direct and alter children’s learning outcomes. Below outlines for
you some purposes of assessment and how assessment can enhance your teaching and
student learning. All of these purposes are important; if you use assessment procedures
appropriately, you will help all children learn well.
The following general principles should guide both policies and practices for the
assessment of young children:
Assessment should bring about benefits for children. Gathering accurate
information from young children is difficult and potentially stressful. Assessments
must have a clear benefit—either in direct services to the child or in improved
quality of educational programs.
Assessment should be tailored to a specific purpose and should be reliable, valid,
and fair for that purpose. Assessments designed for one purpose are not
necessarily valid if used for other purposes. In the past, many of the abuses of
testing with young children have occurred because of misuse.
Assessment policies should be designed recognizing that reliability and validity of
assessments increase with children’s age. The younger the child, the more
difficult it is to obtain reliable and valid assessment data. It is particularly difficult
to assess children’s cognitive abilities accurately before age six. Because of
problems with reliability and validity, some types of assessment should be
postponed until children are older, while other types of assessment can be
pursued, but only with necessary safeguards.
Assessment should be age appropriate in both content and the method of data
collection. Assessments of young children should address the full range of early
learning and development, including physical well-being and motor development;
social and emotional development; approaches toward learning; language
development; and cognition and general knowledge. Methods of assessment
should recognize that children need familiar contexts to be able to demonstrate
their abilities. Abstract paper-and-pencil tasks may make it especially difficult for
young children to show what they know.
Assessment should be linguistically appropriate, recognizing that to some extent
all assessments are measures of language. Regardless of whether an assessment
is intended to measure early reading skills, knowledge of color names, or
learning potential, assessment results are easily confounded by language
proficiency, especially for children who come from home backgrounds with
limited exposure to English, for whom the assessment would essentially be an
assessment of their English proficiency. Each child’s first- and second-language
development should be taken into account when determining appropriate
assessment methods and in interpreting the meaning of assessment results.
Parents should be a valued source of assessment information, as well as an
audience for assessment. Because of the fallibility of direct measures of young
children, assessments should include multiple sources of evidence, especially
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reports from parents and teachers. Assessment results should be shared with
parents as part of an ongoing process that involves parents in their child’s
education.
Purposes of Assessment
Children
Identify what children know
Identify children's special needs
Determine appropriate placement
Select appropriate curricula to meet children's individual needs
Refer children and, as appropriate, their families for additional services to
programs and agencies
Families
Communicate with parents to provide information about their children's progress
and learning
Relate school activities to home activities and experiences
Early Childhood Programs
Make policy decisions regarding what is and is not appropriate for children
Determine how well and to what extent programs and services children receive
are beneficial and appropriate
Early Childhood Teachers
Identify children's skills, abilities, and needs
Make lesson and activity plans and set goals
Create new classroom arrangements
Select materials
Make decisions about how to implement learning activities
Report to parents and families about children's developmental status and
achievement
Monitor and improve the teaching-learning process
Meet the individual needs of children
Group for instruction
The Public
Inform the public regarding children's achievement
Provide information relating to student's school-wide achievements
Provide a basis for public policy (e.g., legislation, recommendations, and
statements)
Benefits of testing? Surely, to most educators, this statement represents an
oxymoron. Testing in schools is usually thought to serve only the purpose of evaluating
students and assigning them grades. Those are important reasons for tests, but not
what we have in mind. Most teachers view tests (and other forms of assessment, such
as homework, essays, and papers) as necessary evils. Yes, students study and learn
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more when given assignments and tests, but they are an ordeal for both the student
(who must complete them) and the teacher (who must construct and grade them).
Quizzes and tests are given frequently in elementary schools, often at the rate of
several or more a week, but testing decreases in frequency the higher a student rises in
the educational system. By the time students are in college, they may be given only a
midterm exam and a final exam in many introductory level courses. Of course,
standardized tests are also given to students to assess their relative performance
compared to other students in their country and assign them a percentile ranking.
Besides these direct effects of testing, there are also indirect effects that are
quite positive. If students are quizzed frequently, they tend to study more and with
more regularity. Quizzes also permit students to discover gaps in their knowledge and
focus study efforts on difficult material; furthermore, when students study after taking a
test, they learn more from the study episode than if they had not taken the test.
Quizzing also enables better metacognitive monitoring for both students and
teachers because it provides feedback as to how well learning is progressing. Greater
learning would occur in educational settings if students used self-testing as a study
strategy and were quizzed more frequently in class. Published tests and assessments
can play an important role in understanding and improving student learning in colleges
and universities by adding dimensions and perspectives not available through locally
developed tests, rubrics, and surveys.
Published tests give colleges a sense of how their students compare against their
peers, and some published tests provide detailed feedback that lets colleges easily
identify relative strengths and weaknesses in their students’ performance. And because
published tests and assessments are typically developed by testing professionals, the
quality of test questions and problems may be superior to what faculty and staff at
individual colleges can develop.
The Purpose of Tests
What is the reason why teachers give students tests? Why do school districts and
states create high stakes tests for their students? On one level, the answer to this
seems fairly obvious: the reason why we give tests is to see what students have
learned. However, this only tells part of the story. Tests have many purposes in our
schools. One thing that should be stressed is that in the end, tests should be for the
benefit of the student and not the teacher, school, district, or state. Unfortunately, this
is not always the case. Following is a look at some of the major reasons why students
are given assessments in and out of the classroom.
1. To Identify What Students Have Learned
The obvious point of classroom tests is to see what the students have learned
after the completion of a lesson or unit. When the classroom tests are tied to effectively
written lesson objectives, the teacher can analyze the results to see where the majority
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of the students are having problems with in their class. These tests are also important
when discussing student progress at parent-teacher conferences.
2. To Identify Student Strengths and Weaknesses
Another use of tests is to determine student strengths and weaknesses. One
effective example of this is when teachers use pretests at the beginning of units in
order to find out what students already know and where the teacher's focus needs to
be. Further, learning style and multiple intelligences tests help teachers learn how to
best meet the needs of their students through instructional techniques.
3. To Provide a Method for Awards and Recognition
Tests can be used as a way to determine who will receive awards and
recognition. For example, the PSAT is often given in the 10th grade to students across
the nation. If a student is a National Merit Scholar due to the results on this test, they
are offered scholarships and other forms of recognition.
4. To Gain College Credit
Advanced Placement exams provide students with the opportunity to earn
college credit after successfully completing a course and passing the exam with high
marks. While every university has its own rules on what scores to accept, most do give
credit for these exams. In many cases, students are able to begin college with a
semester or even a year's worth of credits under their belts.
5. To Provide a Way to Measure a Teacher and/or School's Effectiveness
More and more states are tying funding to schools to the way that students
perform on standardized tests. Further some states are attempting to use these results
when they evaluation and give merit raises to the teachers themselves. This use of high
stakes testing is often contentious with educators since many factors can influence a
student's grade on an exam. Additionally, controversy can sometimes erupt over the
number of hours schools use to specifically 'teach to the test' as they prepare students
to take these exams.
6. To Provide a Basis for Entry into an Internship, Program, or College
Tests have traditionally been used as a way to judge a student based on merit.
Additionally, students might be required to take additional exams to get into special
programs or be placed properly in classes. For example, a student who has taken a few
years of high school French might be required to pass an exam in order to be placed in
the correct year of French.
Yet another concern with published tests and assessments available for higher
education is that they often have more limited evidence of their quality than published
tests used in basic education. While validation studies at the K-12 level can involve tens
of thousands of students, studies of higher education tests often involve far smaller
numbers of students from institutions that may not be a representative sample of all
colleges and universities. While test publishers continue to work diligently to research
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and document the validity and reliability of their tests, at this time we cannot have the
same level of confidence in higher education test results that we have at the K-12 level.
Published tests and assessments can yield valuable insight into student learning
at the higher education level, but only if (1) they correspond to the college’s goals for
student learning, (2) they yield useful feedback that will help the college identify areas
that need improvement, (3) they have convincing evidence of their quality (validity and
reliability), and (4) students have compelling incentives to give the tests their best
effort. Because there is no one perfect instrument, published tests and assessments
should only be used in combination with other evidence of student learning, including
locally-developed measures, job placement rates, and the like, in order to draw a more
accurate overall picture of student learning.
All who are concerned with the future of American higher education can take
steps to ensure that students graduate with appropriate knowledge, skills, and
competencies. First, we can continue to support the American system of accreditation,
which requires all accredited colleges to provide clear, compelling, and appropriate
evidence of rigorous student achievement. Second, we can continue to value the rich
diversity of American higher education and acknowledge that no one test can
adequately evaluate the knowledge, skills, and competencies expected of all of
America’s college students. Finally, we can encourage the development and use of
assessment tools appropriate to each field of study and each sector of American higher
education, so that all students graduate fully prepared for successful careers and
productive service to society.
REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS
http://www.education.com/reference/article/why-assessment-important/
http://images.pearsonclinical.com/images/assets/SFA/SFAOverview.pdf
http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/Roddy%20article%20PDF%27s/BC_Roediger%20et
%20al%20%282011%29_PLM.pdf
https://www.msche.org/publications/published-instruments-in-higher-education.pdf
Notes
4. L. Shepard, S. L. Kagan, and E. Wurtz, Principles and Recommendations for
Early Childhood Assessments (Washington, DC: National Education Goals Panel,
December 14, 1998), 5-6.
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