ST.

COLUMBAN COLLEGE
Pagadian City

A Report Research Paper on the Principles of High Quality

Assessment

By

BABY MARIE F. APAS

AUGUST 10, 2019

Introduction

High-quality assessments are balanced to provide instructors with ongoing

feedback about student progress. In particular, data gathered from assessments given

throughout the learning process give educators the information they need to adjust their

instruction. Assessment, then, isn't the final word; rather, it should be part of an ongoing

conversation that helps all students get exactly what they need to meet learning

standards. Though much attention is placed on how schools and districts use data from

various assessment systems, individual students also directly benefit from carefully

crafted assessment. For one thing, they gain confidence in their own skills and in their

relationships with their teachers when the assessments they must complete are aligned

to the work they've done in class.

A high-quality assessment also provides second chances for students to succeed.

Great assessments aren’t just about a one-time exam. Instead, frequent, formative

assessments are given throughout the learning process, and students know that they will

be allowed the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and show growth. This takes some

of the anxiety out of testing and encourages a more growth-oriented mindset in the

classroom. Great assessment isn't merely about giving a grade to students and

educators. At its best, high-quality assessment provides actionable information to inform

curriculum and instruction decisions and allows for a real-time change of course to meet

students' needs. The first step is to vet and design relevant, standards-based

assessments that are used at many different stages of learning. From there, educators
should approach the resulting data with a spirit of flexibility and adjust their strategies

accordingly.

Discussion

As an essential aspect of K-12 instruction, assessment impacts everything from

district level decisions about resources and training to classroom level decisions that

differentiate instruction and personalize learning. From the district perspective, it affects

instructional needs, curriculum, and school funding while helping to answer the following

critical questions: Are our students learning what they need to learn and at the right pace?

And if not, what can we be doing better to create a roadmap for student success?

Of course, great teaching and strong support for students matter most in how well

students are learning,” NMC/CoSN write in their 2016 Horizon Report, “but clear

standards and useful assessments that actually measure the standards provide the

needed foundation for success. They signal what’s important and how well students are

doing.”

More specifically, high quality assessment empowers educators to be more

effective by optimizing assessment use to boost student achievement, and:

1. Allow for students to use assessment data to make choices about their areas of

concentration and focus. This creates and environment of “choice” and helps to

spur student motivation. It also provides complete visibility into individual student

knowledge and readiness and leverages assessment to understand precisely what

each student does (and doesn’t) know.

 2. Produce valid and reliable results. Assessment data is 85%-95% reliable when it’s

created by content experts within an assessment organization, (add source if we

are quoting directly)

3. Offer connections to standards-based instructional resources. These assets

should include learning objects, including vetted OER, that are interactive and

responsive.

4. Provide structured assessments as well as flexible classroom assessment

capabilites. Fixed formats provide a high-level view of student knowledge and

facilitate comparative analysis. Classroom assessment creation tools should be

robust, and allow for the creation of tech-enhanced item types

5. Generates meaningful and actionable insights. High quality assessment takes the

massive quantities of performance data and translates that into meaningful,

actionable reports that pinpoint current student progress, predict future

achievement, and inform instruction. Administrators use the data to run various

levels of reports, detect patterns at all of those levels, and uncover academic areas

that require additional resources

This would lead us to the principles of high quality assessment. These principles are

as follows; 1) Clarity of learning targets, 2) (knowledge, reasoning, skills, products,

affects), 3) Appropriateness of Assessment Methods, 4) Validity, 5) Reliability, 6)

Fairness, 7) Positive Consequences, 8) Practicality and Efficiency and 9) Ethics.

Clarity of Learning Targets

Assessment can be made precise, accurate and dependable only if what are to be

achieved are clearly stated and feasible. The learning targets, involving knowledge,

reasoning, skills, products and effects, need to be stated in behavioral terms which denote

something which can be observed through the behavior of the students.

 Cognitive Targets Benjamin Bloom (1954) proposed a hierarchy of educational

objectives at the cognitive level. These are:

o Knowledge – acquisition of facts, concepts and theories

o Comprehension - understanding, involves cognition or awareness of the

interrelationships

o Application – transfer of knowledge from one field of study to another of

from one concept to another concept in the same discipline

o Analysis – breaking down of a concept or idea into its components and

explaining g the concept as a composition of these concepts

o Synthesis – opposite of analysis, entails putting together the components in

order to summarize the concept

o Evaluation and Reasoning – valuing and judgment or putting the “worth” of

a concept or principle.

 Skills, Competencies and Abilities Targets

o Skills – specific activities or tasks that a student can proficiently do

o Competencies – cluster of skills

o Abilities – made up of relate competencies categorized as:

 i. Cognitive
  ii. Affective

 iii. Psychomotor Products, Outputs and Project Targets - tangible

and concrete evidence of a student’s ability - need to clearly specify

the level of workmanship of projects

 i. expert

 ii. skilled

 iii. Novice

Appropriateness of Assessment Methods

 Written-Response Instruments
o Objective tests – appropriate for assessing the various levels of hierarchy
of educational objectives

o Essays – can test the students’ grasp of the higher level cognitive skills
o Checklists – list of several characteristics or activities presented to the
subjects of a study, where they will analyze and place a mark opposite to

the characteristics.

 Product Rating Scales

o Used to rate products like book reports, maps, charts, diagrams, notebooks,
creative endeavors

o Need to be developed to assess various products over the years

 Performance Tests - Performance checklist

o Consists of a list of behaviors that make up a certain type of performance
 o Used to determine whether or not an individual behaves in a certain way
when asked to complete a particular task

 Oral Questioning – appropriate assessment method when the objectives are to:
o Assess the students’ stock knowledge and/or

o Determine the students’ ability to communicate ideas in coherent verbal

sentences.

 Observation and Self Reports

o Useful supplementary methods when used in conjunction with oral

questioning and performance tests

Validity

Validity as referring appropriateness, correctness, meaningfulness and usefulness

of the specific conclusions that the teacher reaches regarding the teaching-learning

situation.

o Types of Validity

 Face: What do students think of the test?

 Construct: Am I testing in the way I taught?

 Content: Am I testing what I taught?

 Criterion-related: How does this compare with the existing valid test?
Tests can be made more valid by making them more subjective (open items ).

Moreover, refers to the appropriateness, correctness, meaningfulness and

usefulness of the specific conclusions that a teacher reaches regarding the teaching-

learning situation. The following are the types of validity.

  Content validity – content and format of the instrument.
o Students’ adequate experience
o Coverage of sufficient material

o Reflect the degree of emphasis

 Face validity – outward appearance of the test, the lowest form of test validity

 Criterion-related validity – the test is judge against a specific criterion

 Construct validity – the test is loaded on a “construct” or factor

Reliability

Reliability as an assessment method refers to its consistency. It is also a term that

is synonymous with dependability and stability. Reliability is the extent to which an

experiment, test, or any measuring procedure yields the same result on repeated trials.

 Equivalency reliability is the extent to which two items measure identical

concepts at an identical level of difficulty. Equivalency reliability is

determined by relating two sets of test scores to one another to highlight the

degree of relationship or association.

 Stability reliability (sometimes called test, re-test reliability) is the agreement

of measuring instruments over time. To determine stability, a measure or

test is repeated on the same subjects at a future date.

 Internal consistency is the extent to which tests or procedures assess the

same characteristic, skill or quality. It is a measure of the precision between

the observers or of the measuring instruments used in a study.

  Interrater reliability is the extent to which two or more individuals (coders or

raters) agree. Interrater reliability addresses the consistency of the

implementation of a rating system.

Fairness

An assessment procedure needs to be fair. The concept that assessment should

be 'fair' covers a number of aspects.

o Student Knowledge and learning targets of assessment

Opportunity to learn

o Prerequisite knowledge and skills

o Avoiding teacher stereotype

o Avoiding bias in assessment tasks and procedures

Positive Consequences

Learning assessments provide students with effective feedback and potentially

improve their motivation and/or self-esteem. Moreover, assessments of learning give

students the tools to assess themselves and understand how to improve.

Practicality and Efficiency

Quality of a good assessment procedure is practicality and efficiency. Something

practical is something effective in real situations. A practical test is one which can be

practically administered. Questions: Will the test take longer to design than apply? Will
the test be easy to mark? Tests can be made more practical by making it more objective

(more controlled items)

Ethics

Ethics in Assessment refers to question of right and wrong.

o Conforming to the standards of conduct of a given profession or

group

o Ethical issues that may be raised i. Possible harm to the participants.

ii. Confidentiality. iii. Presence of concealment or deception. iv.

Temptation to assist students.

SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

A high quality assessment has clear learning targets, appropriate in method, valid,

reliable, fair, practical, efficient and ethical. Assessment of student learning is undergoing

profound change at the same time reforms are taking place in learning goals and content

standards, curriculum, instruction, the education of teachers, and the relationships among

parents, communities, schools, government, and business. These Principles provide a

vision of how to transform assessment systems and practices as part of wider school

reform, with a particular focus on improving classroom assessment while ensuring large-

scale assessment also supports learning. To best serve learning, assessment must be

integrated with curriculum and instruction.

 High quality assessment must rest on strong educational foundations. These

foundations include organizing schools to meet the learning needs of all their students,

understanding how students learn, establishing high standards for student learning, and

providing equitable and adequate opportunity to learn.

REFERENCES

Canonigo, A. M. (2012) Principles of high quality assessment. Retrieved on August 1,

2019 from https://www.slideshare.net/acanonigo/principles-of-high-quality

Assessment.

REVIEW OF PRINCIPLES OF HIGH QUALITY ASSESSMENT (Chapter 1). Retrieved

On August 2, 2019 from https://sites.google.com/site/gradingandreporting/review-of

principles-of-high-quality-assessment

Tech & Learning. (2017) 5 key feature of high quality assessment. Retrieved on August

4, 2019 from https://www.techlearning.com/t-l-partner-post/5-key-features-of-high

quality-assessment