Educational Psychology 302

1. Educational Psychology302 Session 12 Student Assessment

2. Contrasts: Assessment Grades Formative Summative Diagnostic Final Non-Judgmental Evaluative Private Administrative Often Anonymous Identified Partial Integrative Specific Holistic Mainly Subtext Mostly Text Suggestive Rigorous Goal-Directed Content-Driven

3. Formative During instructional phase Gauging understanding Informal Summative After instruction Evaluating understanding and comprehension Evaluating mastery Higher stakes Formal Assessment Purposes

4. 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.

5. Characteristics of Good Classroom Assessment • Reliability—consistency of results • Standardization—consistency in content, format and scoring • Validity—the assessment measures what it is supposed to measure • Practicality—The feasibility of the assessment in terms of development time, administration time, cost, etc.

6. 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 Informal vs. Formal

7. 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 Paper-pencil vs. Performance

8. 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 Criterion vs. NormReferenced Referenced

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Portfolio’s • Definition—A 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

12. Objective Tests • Multiple Choice: Stem—alternatives. 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.

13. 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

14. 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.

15. Problem-Solving Examples • One worker can build five benches in one day. For a particular job 20 benches are needed in one day’s 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).