Criteria for High Quality Assessment

Posted by on July 08, 2013

Assessments we can believe in

A new report from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education offers criteria for high-quality student assessments. New assessments should tap “higher-level” cognitive skills that allow students to transfer learning to new situations and problems. The abilities to evaluate, compare, hypothesize, and investigate, and the abilities to analyze, synthesize, design, and create should be the focus of at least one third of the total points in mathematics and at least half in English language arts. Assessments should evaluate critical abilities such as communication (speaking, reading, writing, and listening in multimedia forms), collaboration, modeling, complex problem solving, research, experimentation, and evaluation, and tasks should measure these abilities as they will be used in the real world. Assessments should be as rigorous as those of the leading education countries, in terms of the tasks they present as well as the level of performance they expect. Assessment tasks should also represent the curriculum in ways that respond to instruction and have value for guiding and informing teaching. Finally, in order to have assessments that are truly valid for a wide range of learners, they should accurately evaluate students’ abilities reliably across testing contexts and scorers. They should also be free from bias, and designed to reduce unnecessary obstacles to performance that could undermine validity for some subgroups.

http://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/847