What Are Good Assessment Practices

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What Are Good Assessment Practices?

• Speaker
• Dr. Ahmad Tahan
• Faculty of Applied Arts
• Mansoura University

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• QAA Workshop
• Issues of
• Validity
• Reliability,
• Fairness

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What is Assessment?

• Deciding what we want our students to learn
• Making sure they learn it!
• In courses/modules
• Across programs
• Institution-wide

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The Teaching/Learning/Assessment Cycle
1. Learning Goals
2. Learning Opportunities
4. Using Results
3. Assessment
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Are Perfectly Accurate Assessments Possible?

• Sources of inconsistency that we cant control
• Students health
• Students emotional state
• Memory fluctuations
• Luck in choice of assignment or test questions
• Luck in Guessing
• Mental set (Flashes of insight? In a rut?)

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What Are Good Assessment Practices?
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1. Good assessments are useful.

• Periodically evaluate what youre doing.
• Adapt as things change.

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2. Good assessments give reasonably accurate,
truthful information.
Why do we insist on measuring it with a
micrometer when we mark it with chalk and cut it
with an axe? --Peter Ewell
In assessment, the perfect is the enemy of the
good. Lets keep striving for the good. --Tom
Angelo
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Increasing Accuracy Truthfulness

• Multiple kinds of measures
• Use rubrics and test blueprints
• Match tools to goals
• Score student work fairly consistently

• Take your time
• Clear assignments test questions
• Ask others to review drafts
• Try out (pre-test) new tools

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3. Good assessments are fair to all students.

• Fairness giving students equitable
  opportunities to demonstrate learning
• Variety of assessment formats
• If possible, offer students choices.
• Ask others of varying backgrounds to review
  drafts.

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4. Good assessments are Ethical.

• Protect privacy.
• Minimize potential bias.
• Discourage inappropriate interpretations.
• Use multiple sources for major decisions.

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5. Good assessments are
cost-effective.
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Keeping things simple.

• Focus on a few important goals.
• Do a few well rather than many poorly.
• Use existing information.

• Limit the volume of information.
• Short, samples
• Stop doing something else (Your History).
• Stagger assessments.

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Do You Need to Document the Quality of Your
Assessments?

• Are you making a major/expensive decisions?
• Will your findings be challenged?
• Keep records of everything youve done to
  maximize assessment quality.
• Use other kinds of tools strategies to
  corroborate your findings.
• See if results fall into expected patterns.

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Recap How Can You Maximize Assessment Quality?

• Create useful strategies.
• Create reasonably accurate, truthful strategies.
• Create fair strategies.
• Create ethical strategies.
• Keep efforts cost-effective.

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• Thank you for your interesting
• Any Questions