Week 5 Discussion (2)

Week 5 Discussion

Insert name

Institutional affiliation

Week 5 Discussion

Development of valid, effective, and rigorous assessment helps in determining the students meet the learning expectations. Doing so requires the instructor to undertake various steps. The instructor should first identify the standards that would be addressed during the learning process and deconstruct each standard. This involves breaking the standards into several learning targets after which each of the learning targets would be aligned to various levels of achievement. The instructor should then consider the assessment that would be used to determine if students have learned from the material used in the unit of study. The assessment may comprise of the conventional paper and pencil test using multiple questions, short-answer items. Or performance-based assessment, which include a lab report or project. The test should also include activities that involve various levels of critical thinking.

Prior to implementing the assessments, it is vital for the instructor to ensure the reliability and validity of assessment items. Validity involves the interpretation of the results. It involves determining whether the instructor can use the students’ outcomes of the assessment in accurately assessing the knowledge and skills gained by the student. On the other hand, reliability involves the consistency of the results of the students. The students should have the same score regardless of the day the assessment is undertaken if the assessment is reliable. It is vital for instructors to ensure the assessment is an integral part of the lesson plan. It should not be an afterthought (Pellegrino et al., 2014).

When to undertake on-demand assessments or classroom-embedded assessments are the two major design decisions related to classroom assessment. When undertaking on-demand assessments, it is vital for the instructor to ensure the assessment tests what has been learnt in the recent past. On the other hand, when undertaking classroom-embedded assessments, the instructor should ensure the assessment not only strive to test what has been learnt in the past but their prior knowledge on something that they would learn in the future that is related what has been learnt in the past (Pellegrino et al., 2014).

Reference

Pellegrino, J. W., Wilson, M. R., Koenig, J. A., & Beatty, A. S. (2014). Developing assessments for the next generation science standards. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.