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Dorothy Spiller
Teaching Development | Whanga Whakapakari Ako
February 2009
Principles of Assessment
Introduction
Assessment is the single most important
determinant of student learning. Teachers
communicate to students their values, priorities
and expectations through assessment. According
to Rowntree (1987), The spirit and style of
Teachers
student assessment defines the de facto
curriculum(p.1). As Dunn, Morgan and communicate
OReilly (2004) observe researchers have placed to students
student assessment at the peak of the pyramid as their values,
regards its importance in determining student priorities and
approaches to learning (p.3). For example, if the expectations
assessment emphasises the reproduction of large
volumes of detailed information, students will through
learn in order to reproduce and not necessarily to assessment.
The purposes of
assessment
It is helpful to summarise
the different functions of
assessment:
For students:
For teachers
Diagnostic- teachers can use assessment
tasks to ascertain what students bring into a
course so as to make the teaching and
learning responsive to students needs and
build on existing knowledge
To pass or fail
To grade
Validity
A valid assessment task measures the learning
that it purports to evaluate. The correlation
between the learning outcomes, the teaching
strategies and the assessment task is exact.
Reliability
According to Crooks (1993), if the
assessment information obtained is
so unstable that a very different
picture could emerge if the
assessment process were repeated
soon afterwards, then the
assessment can be seen as
unreliable (p.1).
Formative Assessment
Formative assessment is used
primarily for developmental
purposes. The students have a
chance to learn from the assessment
and improve on their performance.
Summative Assessment
Summative assessment involves a
final grading of student learning;
students do not have the
opportunity to improve on their
performance (the sum of the performance is
measured).
Diagnostic Assessment
This is a piece of assessment usually done at the
beginning of a course to evaluate what students
bring into a course so that their development can
be charted. Initial diagnostic assessment also
enables the teacher to make the learning more
responsive to student needs.
Learning outcomes
Learning outcomes for a paper indicate the
attributes a student may be expected to acquire by
the end of the paper. Learning outcomes will
usually describe a combination of paper content
and particular ways of engaging with the content.
Learning outcomes for a paper are generally
written at the level of learning expected from
papers at a particular stage within a discipline and
in keeping with university guidelines.
Criteria-referenced assessment
A students learning performance
is measured in relation to a set of
clearly defined criteria which have
been designed in advance of the
assessment and which are
explicitly linked to course learning
outcomes.
Course
Learning
Outcomes
Aims
Assessment Tasks
Teaching and
Assessment Criteria
Learning
Approaches
Vocabulary List
1. Level 1 English
Students will be expected to be able analyse a
passage from a literary text closely and make
links between the extract and the rest of the text.
111. Level 1
Law
Students will be
expected to
demonstrate
elementary
skills of legal
analysis in the
context of an
introduction to
New Zealand
law using simple and accessible cases.