Assignment Questions
1. List three things you learned about assessment and measurement in the context of the video discussions.
First and foremost, properly conceived assessment is an essential aspect of education. The educational review process and all associated components should be routinely examined to ensure quality as well as make improvements. Because learning is a very complex endeavor, it is important to create measurement instruments that are sufficiently comprehensive and applicable (Gronlund, 2013). As such, the item banks of standardized tests should be expanded by including performance tasks (e.g., short-answer, long-response, essay, and so on) in addition to the multiple-choice test format. While they allow for timely and efficient …show more content…
Even with the inclusion of innovative test items that theoretically depart from traditional, text-based multiple-choice formats, large-scale standardized tests are still inadequate for assessing cognitive learning on a micro-level (Hursh, 2008). As such, they tend to be biased to the evaluation of isolated skill sets rather than complex intellectual capacities such as reasoning, decision making, critical thinking, or hypothesis generation. Schools emphasizing test preparation are likely to devote most of their curriculum budgets to test-prep materials rather than the enriched resources that students need (Hursh, 2008). In fact, it’s (paradoxically) possible that schools may expect less of their students as they prepare them to use the more basic skills required to pass standardized tests. In other words, rather than instructing students to write creatively and thoughtfully, teachers may focus on composition techniques and strategies that emphasis form over content in order to ensure passing grades on standardized tests, resulting in prose that is grammatically sound yet devoid of abstraction, critical evaluation, or elaboration of ideas (Hursh, 2008). It’s also important to consider that the impact of an examinee’s prior computer experience depends on the type of item (and item interface) in computerized assessments. That is to say, an important equity consideration is that the level of prior computer experience in the test population may be systematically different across examinee subgroups. Prior to testing, different examinee subgroups may have had different opportunities for computer access and familiarity (Hursh,
1. List three things you learned about assessment and measurement in the context of the video discussions.
First and foremost, properly conceived assessment is an essential aspect of education. The educational review process and all associated components should be routinely examined to ensure quality as well as make improvements. Because learning is a very complex endeavor, it is important to create measurement instruments that are sufficiently comprehensive and applicable (Gronlund, 2013). As such, the item banks of standardized tests should be expanded by including performance tasks (e.g., short-answer, long-response, essay, and so on) in addition to the multiple-choice test format. While they allow for timely and efficient …show more content…
Even with the inclusion of innovative test items that theoretically depart from traditional, text-based multiple-choice formats, large-scale standardized tests are still inadequate for assessing cognitive learning on a micro-level (Hursh, 2008). As such, they tend to be biased to the evaluation of isolated skill sets rather than complex intellectual capacities such as reasoning, decision making, critical thinking, or hypothesis generation. Schools emphasizing test preparation are likely to devote most of their curriculum budgets to test-prep materials rather than the enriched resources that students need (Hursh, 2008). In fact, it’s (paradoxically) possible that schools may expect less of their students as they prepare them to use the more basic skills required to pass standardized tests. In other words, rather than instructing students to write creatively and thoughtfully, teachers may focus on composition techniques and strategies that emphasis form over content in order to ensure passing grades on standardized tests, resulting in prose that is grammatically sound yet devoid of abstraction, critical evaluation, or elaboration of ideas (Hursh, 2008). It’s also important to consider that the impact of an examinee’s prior computer experience depends on the type of item (and item interface) in computerized assessments. That is to say, an important equity consideration is that the level of prior computer experience in the test population may be systematically different across examinee subgroups. Prior to testing, different examinee subgroups may have had different opportunities for computer access and familiarity (Hursh,