Assessment Strategies -- WHAT'S THE QUESTION?

FOUR ASSESSMENT STRATEGIES: MEETING STANDARDS

The answer to this question requires what my measurement colleagues refer to as "Criterion Referencing Assessment." This is a form of Summative Evaluation that is most apparent in the traditional accreditation and certification approaches where students and programs are judged by the whether or not they meet certain standards that have been agreed upon by faculty or other experts in the field. This assessment approach requires definition and agreement about minimum standards or threshold levels of performance. While true scientific measurement is rare, tests of competency and performance skill, quantitative measures of knowledge, licensing exams, and professional judgment methodology are common. While the performance standards for individual students can be locally determined(such as a basic skills test), this type of assessment usually involves the employment of state (the Bar Exam), regional (Middle States), or national (Medical Boards) standards. Centralized approaches, therefore, are the most common.

Advantages

• Focuses on ensuring minimum competencies among all students and programs.
• Requires agreement about acceptable levels of performance, thus clarifying the educational and curricular objectives.
• Useful for making summative decisions about the continuance and discontinuance of students and programs.

• Largely ignores how much students have learned, and few faculty are comfortable disregarding where students started from in the learning process.
• Agreement about acceptable levels of performance may be difficult to achieve.
• Little basis of comparison with performance at other institutions, except on the basis of the percent of students that pass.
• Like pass/fail grading, such assessment often make no distinction between acceptable and top performance.
• Basic validity rests with the assessment instrument and the definition of the performance criterion (this can be a problem especially with locally designed instruments).
• If the standard is set externally, the curriculum loses its local focus.