Chapter 3
Designing High Quality Assessments
What's in This Chapter?
While Chapters 1 and 2 strive to help users develop an overall vision of the role of assessment in instruction and explain how purposes affect assessment design, Chapter 3 begins a detailed examination of design options and related quality considerations. What do some of the current assessments look like? When should various design options be used? How do assessment purposes relate to design options? What do high quality alternative assessments look like? These questions, relevant to both large-scale and classroom assessment, are addressed in this chapter.
Chapter Goals
1. Illustrate design options for alternative assessments
2. Expand expertise in developing alternative assessments
3. Present guidelines for assessing the quality and appropriateness of alternative assessments for particular purposes and contexts
4. Provide experience in choosing high quality assessments
5. Examine issues of equity, fairness, bias, and unintended consequences of assessment
Chapter Content
A. Readings
- Background Information
- This section sets up the rest of the chapter by specifying the two required parts of an alternative assessment (tasks and criteria) and the need for quality.
- Performance Tasks—Design Options and Quality Considerations
- The first required element of an alternative assessment are tasks—activities for students to do. This section describes design alternatives for tasks, provides advice on when to use various designs, and discusses quality issues that must be addressed when designing tasks.
- Performance Criteria—Design Options and Quality Considerations
- The second required part of an alternative assessment are criteria that specify the basis on which the quality of student performance on the task(s) will be judged. This section describes design alternatives for criteria, provides advice on when to use various designs, and discusses quality issues that must be addressed when designing criteria.
- This section discusses quality issues that go beyond those for tasks and criteria—adequate content and skill coverage, fairness and bias, consequences of assessment, and cost/efficiency.
- The quality issues described in this chapter are summarized in a rating form that can be used to review alternative assessments for quality.
Activities in This Chapter
- Activity 3.1 Performance Tasks—Keys to Success
- This advanced level activity illustrates the dimensions along which performance tasks differ and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. It uses example assessments from Appendix A. Time: 60 to 90 minutes
- Activity 3.2 Spectrum of Assessment Activity
- Part A of this activity asks participants to review Bloom's Taxonomy and develop assessment questions and tasks that tap different levels. In Part B, participants review a variety of short, related assessment tasks and rank them according to the type of skills and knowledge each might elicit from students. The goal is to design tasks that really assess desired learning targets. This is an advanced level activity. Time: Part A, 90 minutes to 2 hours; Part B, 90 minutes
- Activity 3.3 Performance Criteria—Keys to Success
- This advanced level activity illustrates the characteristics of sound performance criteria. It uses assessment samples from Appendix A. Time: 60-90 minutes
- Activity 3.4 Assessing Learning: The Student's Toolbox
- This intermediate activity illustrates the relationship between different ways to design assessment tasks and the student learning to be assessed. Time: 20-30 minutes (variation takes 45-60 minutes)
- Activity 3.5 Performance Tasks and Criteria: A Mini-Development Activity
- In this advanced level activity, participants discuss how good assessment equals good instruction and the issues in using and designing performance assessments. Participants use assessment samples from Appendix A. Time: 2-3 hours
- Activity 3.6 How to Critique an Assessment
- In this advanced level activity, participants practice aligning assessment and instruction and evaluating a performance assessment for quality. Time: 1-2 hours
- Activity 3.7 Chickens and Pigs: Language and Assessment
- This introductory level activity emphasizes the critical role that language plays in effective and equitable assessments. Time: 10-20 minutes
- Activity 3.8 Questions About Culture and Assessment
- This introductory level activity increases awareness of the relationship between culture and assessment by demonstrating how cultural factors can affect student ability to show what they know and can do. Time: 90 minutes
- Activity 3.9 Tagalog Math Problem
- This introductory level activity illustrates how lack of knowledge of a language can affect performance on skills that have nothing to do with language understanding (like math). Time: 20-30 minutes