The Role of Assessment in Teaching

The Role of Assessment in Teaching
Assessing student learning is something that every teacher has to do, usually quite frequently. Written tests, book reports, research papers, homework exercises, oral presentations, question-and-answer sessions, science projects, and artwork of various sorts are just some of the ways in which teachers measure student learning, with written tests accounting for about 45 percent of a typical student's course grade (Green & Stager, 1986/1987). It is no surprise, then, that the typical teacher can spend between one-third and one-half of her class time engaged in one or another type of measurement activity (Stiggins, 1994). Yet despite the amount of time teachers spend assessing student learning, it is a task that most of them dislike and that few do well. One reason is that many teachers have little or no in-depth knowledge of assessment principles (Crooks, 1988; Hills, 1991; Stiggins, Griswold, & Wikelund, 1989). Another reason is that the role of assessor is seen as being inconsistent with the role of teacher (or helper). Since teachers with more training in assessment use more appropriate assessment practices than do teachers with less training (Green & Stager, 1986/1987), a basic goal of this chapter is to help you understand how such knowledge can be used to reinforce, rather than work against, your role as teacher. Toward that end, we will begin by defining what we mean by the term assessment and by two key elements of this process, measurement and evaluation.

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What is Assessment?
Broadly conceived, classroom assessment involves two major types of activities: collecting information about how much knowledge and skill students have learned (measurement) and making judgments about the adequacy or acceptability of each student's level of learning (evaluation). Both the measurement and evaluation aspects of classroom assessment can be accomplished in a number of ways. To determine how much learning has occurred, teachers can, for example, have students take exams, respond to oral questions, do homework exercises, write papers, solve problems, and make oral presentations. Teachers can then evaluate the scores from those activities by comparing them either to one another or to an absolute standard (such as an A equals 90 percent correct). Throughout much of this chapter we will explain and illustrate the various ways in which you can measure and evaluate student learning.
Measurement
Measurement is the assignment of numbers to certain attributes of objects, events, or people according to a rule-governed system. For our purposes, we will limit the discussion to attributes of people. For example, we can measure someone's level of typing proficiency by counting the number of words the person accurately types per minute or someone's level of mathematical reasoning by counting the number of problems correctly solved. In a classroom or other group situation, the rules that are used to assign the numbers will ordinarily create a ranking that reflects how much of the attribute different people possess (Linn & Gronlund, 1995).
Evaluation
Evaluation involves using a rule-governed system to make judgments about the value or worth of a set of measures (Linn & Gronlund, 1995). What does it mean, for example, to say that a student answered eighty out of one hundred earth science questions correctly? Depending on the rules that are used, it could mean that the student has learned that body of knowledge exceedingly well and is ready to progress to the next unit of instruction or, conversely, that the student has significant knowledge gaps and requires additional instruction.