Four Pillars of Assessment : Value (4)

Assessments can have positive and negative effects, something known as the washback effect. The intended effects of assessment, such as pupils studying more, or high-quality feedback for learning, are known as positive washback. The unintended negative effects from assessment – such as unmanageable workload, teaching to the test, decreased time for other activities – are the negative washback effects.

In many ways, effective assessment is learning how to maximise positive washback and minimise negative washback. The main way in which we approach this is to create strong and explicit links between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Ultimately, pupils should be able to “experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information” (On Knowing: Essays forthe Left Hand by J S Bruner 1979); it is information derived from well-designed, purposeful, planned assessments which bridges the gap between teaching and learning.

Better information can inform better decisions, and better decisions can lead to better learning. And if that’s not the most valuable outcome, what is?

Read more at: https://evidencebased.education/pillars-assessment-value/ 

Four Pillars of Assessment: Reliability (3)

Have you ever weighed yourself in the morning, and then again in the afternoon? If you did, you probably got slightly different readings each time. So how much do you weigh? Which is the correct reading (if either of them is indeed ‘correct’)? Most people answer this question with the obvious response (‘the lower one’), but at the heart of the issue is the reliability of the measurement: its accuracy and consistency over time, and context.

Reliability in the assessment of student learning is also about accuracy and consistency and, as a rule, the higher the stakes of the decision we want to make based on assessment information, the more accurate and consistent we want the information to be. High-stakes decisions need highly reliable information. As we saw with validity, a determination of how reliable an assessment needs to be is informed by its intended end uses.

Read more at: https://evidencebased.education/pillars-assessment-reliability/