Education
What You Need to Know About Assessment
A quick guide on the purpose it serves
Assessment serves many different purposes:
- It can provide evidence on the effectiveness of a certain course
- Present a goal for students
- Rank the achievement of learners
- Provide evidence for future careers
However, the main purpose of assessment for a tutor or teacher is an ongoing measurement of whether learning is taking place successfully. (Petty, 2009, 479)
Initial assessment should happen before a student starts a course. It is a useful tool for asserting whether the learner has chosen the right course and also identifies any strength, weakness or existing areas of knowledge. For some courses, students may need a certain level of numeracy or literacy skills or have entry requirements, initial assessment can be used therefore to make sure a student meets these requirements and should be able to achieve. As a result initial assessment will provide information about the student’s level or ability and aids planning for learning. (Gravells, 2008, 75)
There are many forms of assessment but mainly they fall into two categories:
Formative
This normally happens during the course and is on-going; it is used normally to provide feedback and learning outcomes, informing both teacher and student of progress. Formative assessment can be formal, meaning an exam or test situation where students know they are being assessed, or informal, where the students don’t necessarily know assessment is taking place or an informal discussion takes place.
Summative
This normally happens at the end of the course to test achievement of the course objectives, such as a final examination and is on the whole formal. However summative assessment can also be used at the end of units of work or modules and doesn’t have to take a formal nature. (Gravells, 2008, 76)
All assessment is ultimately subjective: there is no such thing as an “objective test”. Even when there is a high degree of standardisation, the judgement of what things are tested and what constitutes a criterion of satisfactory performance is in the hands of the assessor.
Atherton, 2009, [online]
However strategies should be put in place, such as standardisation and moderation, to try and make sure that assessment is valid, fair and reliable, for example it should not assess spelling when those abilities are not relevant to the topic.
Methods of assessment
Assessment methods are wide and varied and should take many forms to account for fairness, they can be:
- Written
- Practical
- Self, peer or teacher assessed
They can be structured as discussion, observation, computer based or projects this list is far from exhaustive. In more expressive subjects such as, drama and dance, they tend to be more practical based and of a formative nature. In general students are required to compile a practical piece of work that is assessed through informal formative observation and question and answer whilst it is being created and then the performance is the summative result of the unit of work which is formally graded with a level that can be used as a monitor of progress, feedback and smart target setting between teacher, parent and student.
Whichever methods are used, assessment can be said to turn:
Teaching into teaching. Mere presentation without assessment of what the learners have made of what you have offered them is not teaching.
(Atherton, 2009, [online])
Therefore it is an essential part of teaching at every stage and without it we would have no way of measuring if learning is taking place.
Article written by Drama Llama | Educator | Writer | Academic | Consultant