Educational Psychology 302

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Educational Psychology302

• Session 12
• Student Assessment

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Contrasts Assessment Grades Formative Su
mmative Diagnostic Final Non-Judgmenta
l Evaluative Private Administrative Oft
en Anonymous Identified Partial Integrative
Specific Holistic Ma
inly Subtext Mostly Text
Suggestive Rigorous Goal-Dir
ected Content-Driven
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Assessment Purposes

• Formative
• During instructional phase
• Gauging understanding
• Informal

• Summative
• After instruction
• Evaluating understanding and comprehension
• Evaluating mastery
• Higher stakes
• Formal

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Constructing Assessments

• Target the specific behaviors and thought
  processes you want them to learn
• Be difficult enough that students must expend
  energy to succeed.
• Show students where and why their answers might
  have been wrong, and how they might improve on
  their answers.
• Demonstrate, where appropriate, how several paths
  to the right answer might be taken.

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Characteristics of Good Classroom Assessment

• Reliabilityconsistency of results
• Standardizationconsistency in content, format
  and scoring
• Validitythe assessment measures what it is
  supposed to measure
• PracticalityThe feasibility of the assessment in
  terms of development time, administration time,
  cost, etc.

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Informal vs. Formal

• Form Observations, questioning
• Very practical, usually spontaneous
• Good for assessing students interest in a
  subject
• Flexible to spur of the moment changes and
  adjustments
• Will rarely, if ever, be standardized

• Focus on assessing understanding within a
  specific content domain
• Very much planned in advance
• Closely tied to guiding instructional objectives
• Bases results on samples of content

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Paper-pencil vs. Performance

• Suitable for both recall and recognition tasks
• Easily standardized
• Can sample knowledge on many topics in a short
  time
• Students should understand scoring process
• Portray the assessment as an opportunity to
  improve skills

• Efficiently uses class time
• Formatively oriented
• Helps reduce the evaluative climate
• Difficult to achieve standardization and
  reliability
• Often time-consuming to administer and score

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Criterion vs. NormReferenced
Referenced

• Tells us what the students have achieved in
  relation to specific instructional objectives
• Oriented to achieving mastery
• Diagnoses weaknesses very well

• Compares a students performance on a task with
  the performance of other students
• Frequently used in standardized tests
• Can undermine the sense of community and create
  undo competitive situation

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Criterion or Norm Referenced?

• Ivy is taking an achievement test in English.
  Her score will let her know how her performance
  compares with that of her classmates.
• Leon is taking a Spanish test that will determine
  whether he should be placed in an advanced
  section of Spanish II designed for students who
  have achieved a an especially high level in
  Spanish I.

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Criterion or Norm Referenced?

• Mr. Jones asks his physical education students to
  do as many chin-ups and push-ups as they can. He
  requires at least 4 chi-ups and 20 push-ups from
  each student.
• Mr. Duchesne grades students essays on the
  causes of the American Revolution, giving the
  five best essays an A, the next five best a B,
  and so on.

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Portfolios

• DefinitionA systematic collection of student
  work assembled over time
• Integrates instruction and assessment
• Can be useful in promoting students
  self-evaluation
• Can illustrate the complex nature of students
  achievement
• Often have low reliability and validity
• Almost impossible to standardize

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Objective Tests

• Multiple Choice Stemalternatives. Recognition
  task. Can measure a variety of learning levels,
  easy to grade.
• True/False Statements a student judges as
  correct or incorrect. Easy to write and grade,
  tests recognition with a high probability of
  guesses.
• Matching Identify relationships. Asks students
  to apply discrimination skills. Tests a large
  amount of information in a short space.

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Multiple-Choice Example

• An advantage of knowing some skills to a level of
  automaticity is that skills learned to
  automaticity
• a.  require less working memory capacity
• b.  promote the development of retrieval cues
• c.   make meaningful learning of those skills
  unnecessary
• d. enhance the reconstructive nature of
  retrieval

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Constructed Response Tests

• Tests high-level cognitive skills, but,
  time-consuming to grade and difficult to ensure
  reliability.
• Short answer Requires a single word, set of
  words, or sentence or complete.
• Essay Requires learners to organize and express
  their thoughts over several or more paragraphs.
• Problem-solving Presents situation for the
  learner to diagnose and solve.

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Problem-Solving Examples

• One worker can build five benches in one day.
  For a particular job 20 benches are needed in one
  days time. How many workers need to be assigned
  to the job? Show all your work and circle the
  final answer.
• You are given a beaker that contains one of five
  chemical solutions used in previous laboratory
  exercises. Describe a procedure that you would
  use to positively identify the particular
  solution and rule out the other alternatives.
  (be sure to list each major step in you solution).