Course: (8602) Educational Assessment and Evaluation Level: B.ed Semester: Autumn, 2022

 

Assignment.1

Q. No. 1     Explain the concepts of measurement, assessment and evaluation. Further elaborate the difference between them with examples

Ans.

Measurement

When one of the sets of numerals is assigned to each set of objects, be it person or commodity, as per the accepted rules or standards and described in standard words, units and symbols, so as to characterize the status of that object it is called as measurement. In education, measurement implies the quantitative assessment of the student’s performance in an exam.It is a mechanical process, which involves the systematic study of the attributes with the help of appropriate assessment tools. It transforms the variable into variate, which is effective in making deductions. For instance, Intelligence is measured in terms of IQ, and the result variable is measured as scores.Further, it is helpful in comparing the performance of various students as well as in highlighting their positive and negative points.

 

Physical Measurement: The measurement of an object which materially exists, it is called as physical measurement. For instance, measurement of height or weight of an individual using a measuring tape or weighing machine, starting from zero points.

Mental Measurement: Otherwise called as psychological measurement. It is not defined in absolute terms, rather it is relative. It is not measured with the help of any instrument but on the basis of the individual’s response or critical observation. For instance, measuring the amount of work done by an individual is psychological or mental measurement.

Evaluation

Evaluation can be defined as the act of assigning value to the measure. It is a systematic and continuous process wherein the analysis of the outcome derived from the measurement of the characteristic of the object, person or activity is performed as per the defined standards. Further, the relative position of the person, object or activity is ascertained, on the basis of the characteristic.

In evaluation. what we do is, we pass judgement regarding how suitable, desirable or valuable something is. In education, evaluation alludes to the overall assessment of the progress of the student, with respect to:

·        Defined objectives

·        Efficiency of teaching and

·        Effectiveness of the curriculum.

It acts like an ‘inbuilt monitor’, within the system, that tends to review the learning progress, at various points in time. It also provides feedback on various aspects of the educational systems, such as on teaching to the teachers and on learning to the learners.

So we can conclude that:

Evaluation = Quantitative description + Qualitative Description + Value Judgement

where, the quantitative description includes facts and figures and the qualitative description includes ranking, weightage and value.Hence, in evaluation, the knowledge of the student/learner is not the only aspect which is considered, rather all the aspects which are important for his/her development are taken into consideration.

So, evaluation covers four different aspects, namely:role-of-evaluation

·        Objectives

·        Learning Experiences

·        Learner’s appraisal

Relationship between the above three

It aims at ascertaining the progress of the student, reforming the system of education and increasing the answerability for outcomes.

Differences Between Measurement and Evaluation

Check out the point stated below, to understand the differences between measurement and evaluation:

·        Measurement can be understood as the process of determining the attributes and dimensions of a physical object. On the other hand, evaluation is an ongoing process of measuring and assigning qualitative meaning, by passing value judgements.

·        Measurement accounts for the observations which can be expressed numerically, i.e. quantitative observations. Conversely, evaluation includes both quantitative and qualitative observations.

·        Measurement entails the assignment of numerals to the person or object as per the certain rules. As against, evaluation involves the assignment of grades, level or symbols according to established standards.

·        While measurement focuses on one or more attributes or traits of a person or object, evaluation covers all the aspects including cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning.

·        Measurement analyses how much, how tall, how fast, how hot, how far or how small something is and that too in numerical terms. In contrast, evaluation answers how well something is which is done by adding meaning or value judgement to the measurement.

·        With measurement, one cannot make logical assumptions about the learner, but this is not in the case of evaluation.

·        Measurement consumes less time and energy as it uses tools or measuring devices, to serve the purpose. As against, evaluation requires observation and it passes value judgement, which consumes time and energy.

·        When it comes to scope, measurement has a limited scope because it takes into account only a number of dimensions of personality or attribute. But, evaluation covers all the dimensions before passing value judgement. Moreover, the evaluation includes measurement. Hence, its scope is wider.

·        Measurement is content-oriented whereas evaluation is objective oriented.

 

Q. No. 2  Define classroom assessment. What is the role of classroom assessment in teaching?

Ans.

Classroom assessment is the process of collecting and interpreting information about. learning and teaching as it occurs in a classroom for the purpose of making decisions. that improve opportunities for learning

Purpose of Classroom Assessment

Assessment is used to:inform and guide teaching and learning

A good classroom assessment plan gathers evidence of student learning that informs teachers' instructional decisions. It provides teachers with information about what students know and can do. To plan effective instruction, teachers also need to know what the student misunderstands and where the misconceptions lie. In addition to helping teachers formulate the next teaching steps, a good classroom assessment plan provides a road map for students. Students should, at all times, have access to the assessment so they can use it to inform and guide their learning.

help students set learning goals

Students need frequent opportunities to reflect on where their learning is at and what needs to be done to achieve their learning goals. When students are actively involved in assessing their own next learning steps and creating goals to accomplish them, they make major advances in directing their learning and what they understand about themselves as learners.

assign report card grades

Grades provide parents, employers, other schools, governments, post-secondary institutions and others with summary information about student learning.

motivate students

Research (Davies 2004; Stiggins et al. 2004) has shown that students will be motivated and confident learners when they experience progress and achievement, rather than the failure and defeat associated with being compared to more successful peers.

CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES (CATS)

Classroom Assessment is a systematic approach to formative evaluation, used by instructors to determine how much and how well students are learning. CATs and other informal assessment tools provide key information during the semester regarding teaching and learning so that changes can be made as necessary. "The central purpose of Classroom Assessment is to empower both teachers and their students to improve the quality of learning in the classroom" through an approach that is "learner-centered, teacher-directed, mutually beneficial, formative, context-specific, and firmly rooted in good practice" (Angelo & Cross, 1993, p. 4).In their book, Classroom Assessment Techniques, Angelo and Cross describe 50 Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)-simple tools (instruments, forms, strategies, activities) for collecting information on student learning in order to improve it. CATs are easy to design, administer and analyze, and have the added benefit of involving students in their own learning. They are typically non-graded, anonymous in-class activities that are embedded in the regular work of the class. The 50 CATS are divided into three broad categories:

 

·        Techniques for assessing course-related knowledge and skills

·        Techniques for assessing learner attitudes, values and self-awareness

·        Techniques for assessing learner reactions to instruction

EXAMPLES OF EASY-TO-USE CATS

Minute Papers and Muddiest Point, the best known and easiest CATs, are used to assess course-related knowledge and skills.

One-Sentence Summaries challenge students to answer the questions "Who does what to whom, when, where, how, and why?" about a particular topic, and then to synthesize those answers into a single, informative, grammatical, and long summary sentence. It allows you to find out how concisely, completely, and creatively students can summarize a large amount of information on a given topic. The format allows you to scan and compare responses quickly and easily. This CAT gives students practice in using a technique for "chunking" information-condensing it into smaller, interrelated bits that are more easily processed and recalled-and makes it is easier for them to recall the information. To use:

Select an important topic that your students have recently studied in your class and that you expect them to learn to summarize.

Students should be told to answer the questions, "Who Did/Does What to Whom, When, Where, How, and Why?" in relation to the topic. Providing a matrix with the questions ("Who?" "Does What?" etc.) listed down the left side of the page makes it easier for students to create the sentence. Some topics don't fit into this format described and you may need to create a different pattern, such as, "How Does Who Do What and Why?"

Students should then turn their answers into a grammatical sentence that follows the pattern given.

Practice the task yourself to be sure you can coherently summarize the topic in one sentence.

You can evaluate their responses by marking each component (Who, What, How, etc.) with a zero, check, or plus. You can then make a matrix to represent the whole class's responses. This will tell you if students are having a more difficult time, for example, answering the "how" and "why" questions than the "who" and "what" questions.

Course-Related Self-Confidence Surveys are used to assess your students' levels of confidence in their ability to learn the skills and content of your course. This is especially important to know in some specific contexts: students' mathematical skills, their ability to speak in public, their athletic ability, etc. When you know the confidence levels of the students, and what affects their confidence, you can build assignments that build confidence. To use:

Focus on skills or abilities that are important to success in the course.

Make up questions to assess students' self-confidence in relation to these skills or abilities.

Create a simple survey to gather the data. For example: How confident do you feel you will be able to do the following by the end of this course? For each, indicate: Very confident, somewhat, not very, not at all confident

·        Feel comfortable working out in a gym and/or running in a public place.

·        Run three miles in 30 minutes.

·        Maintain your exercise program for a year after the class has ended.

·        Allow students a few minutes to respond. Be sure to tell them that the survey is anonymous.

·        Summarizing the data is a simple process of tallying responses to each question.

·        Reading Rating Sheets and Assignment Assessments are used to assess learner reactions to instruction. Reading Rating Sheets are short, simple assessment forms that students fill out in response to their assigned course reading. The purpose is to provide you with feedback on students' evaluation of course readings. You can use this CAT to find out how motivating, interesting, clear, and useful the readings are to your students. Assignment Assessments ask students to consider the value of assignments to them as learners. You can use this technique to see assignments from the students' perspective; get feedback on difficulty level, learning value, and interest level of the project/assignment; and also motivate students to complete assignments because they know they will have an opportunity to assess the assignments. To use:

Determine why you want students to rate the course readings or to assess an assignment and then write a few questions that will elicit the information you desire.

 

Q. No. 3     Describe the types of achievement tests. Explain the purpose of these tests in detail?

Ans.

The achievement tests that most people are familiar with are the standard exams taken by every student in school. Students are regularly expected to demonstrate their learning and proficiency in a variety of subjects. In most cases, certain scores on these achievement tests are needed in order to pass a class or continue on to the next grade level.

The role of achievement tests in education has become much more pronounced since the passage of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.1 This legislation focused on standard-based education which was used to measure educational goals and outcomes. While this law was later replaced by the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, achievement testing remains a key element in measuring educational success and plays a role in determining school funding.2

But achievement tests are not just important during the years of K-12 education and college. They can be used to assess skills when people are trying to learn a new sport. If you were learning dance, martial arts, or some other specialized athletic skill, an achievement test can be important for determining your current level of ability and possible need for further training.

Examples of Achievement Tests

Some more examples of achievement tests include:

·        A math exam covering the latest chapter in your book

·        A test in your social psychology class

·        A comprehensive final in your Spanish class

·        The ACT and SAT exams

A skills demonstration in your martial arts class

Each of these tests is designed to assess how much you know at a specific point in time about a certain topic. Achievement tests are not used to determine what you are capable of; they are designed to evaluate what you know and your level of skill at the given moment.

As you can see, achievement tests are widely used in a number of domains, both academic- and career-related. Students face an array of achievement tests almost every day as they complete their studies at all grade levels, from pre-K through college. Such tests allow educators and parents to assess how their kids are doing in school, but also provide feedback to students on their own performance.

When Are Achievement Tests Used?

Achievement tests are often used in educational and training settings. In schools, for example, achievements tests are frequently used to determine the level of education for which students might be prepared. Students might take such a test to determine if they are ready to enter into a particular grade level or if they are ready to pass of a particular subject or grade level and move on to the next.

Standardized achievement tests are also used extensively in educational settings to determine if students have met specific learning goals. Each grade level has certain educational expectations, and testing is used to determine if schools, teachers, and students are meeting those standards.

So how exactly are achievement tests created? In many instances, subject matter experts help determine what content standards should exist for a certain subject. These standard represent the things that an individual at a certain skill or grade level should know about a particular subject. Test designers can then use this information to develop exams that accurately reflect the most important things that a person should know about that topic.

Achievement Tests vs Aptitude Tests

Achievement tests differ in important ways from aptitude tests. An aptitude test is designed to determine your potential for success in a certain area. For example, a student might take an aptitude test to help determine which types of career they might be best suited for. An achievement test, on the other hand, would be designed to determine what a student already knows about a specific subject.

A Word From Verywell

Achievement tests play an important role in education, but they have also been the subject of criticism at times. Some feel that excessive testing interferes with the educational process and places too much emphasis on passing a test while ignoring more important abilities such as critical and creative thinking. However, such tests do provide a fairly efficient way to get an idea of how well students are performing

The different types of tests

1. Unit tests

Unit tests are very low level and close to the source of an application. They consist in testing individual methods and functions of the classes, components, or modules used by your software. Unit tests are generally quite cheap to automate and can run very quickly by a continuous integration server.

2. Integration tests

Integration tests verify that different modules or services used by your application work well together. For example, it can be testing the interaction with the database or making sure that microservices work together as expected. These types of tests are more expensive to run as they require multiple parts of the application to be up and running.

3. Functional tests

Functional tests focus on the business requirements of an application. They only verify the output of an action and do not check the intermediate states of the system when performing that action.There is sometimes a confusion between integration tests and functional tests as they both require multiple components to interact with each other. The difference is that an integration test may simply verify that you can query the database while a functional test would expect to get a specific value from the database as defined by the product requirements.

4. End-to-end tests

End-to-end testing replicates a user behavior with the software in a complete application environment. It verifies that various user flows work as expected and can be as simple as loading a web page or logging in or much more complex scenarios verifying email notifications, online payments, etc...

End-to-end tests are very useful, but they're expensive to perform and can be hard to maintain when they're automated. It is recommended to have a few key end-to-end tests and rely more on lower level types of testing (unit and integration tests) to be able to quickly identify breaking changes.

5. Acceptance testing

Acceptance tests are formal tests that verify if a system satisfies business requirements. They require the entire application to be running while testing and focus on replicating user behaviors. But they can also go further and measure the performance of the system and reject changes if certain goals are not met.

6. Performance testing

Performance tests evaluate how a system performs under a particular workload. These tests help to measure the reliability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness of an application. For instance, a performance test can observe response times when executing a high number of requests, or determine how a system behaves with a significant amount of data. It can determine if an application meets performance requirements, locate bottlenecks, measure stability during peak traffic, and more.

 

Q. No. 4     What are the types of selection types tests items? What are the advantages of multiple choice questions

Ans.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Types of Test Questions

multiple-choice test

It’s good to regularly review the advantages and disadvantages of the most commonly used test questions and the test banks that now frequently provide them.

MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS

Advantages

Quick and easy to score, by hand or electronically

Can be written so that they test a wide range of higher-order thinking skills

Can cover lots of content areas on a single exam and still be answered in a class period

Disadvantages

Often test literacy skills: “if the student reads the question carefully, the answer is easy to recognize even if the student knows little about the subject” (p. 194)

Provide unprepared students the opportunity to guess, and with guesses that are right, they get credit for things they don’t know

Expose students to misinformation that can influence subsequent thinking about the content

Take time and skill to construct (especially good questions)

TRUE-FALSE QUESTIONS

Advantages

·        Quick and easy to score

·        Disadvantages

 

Considered to be “one of the most unreliable forms of assessment” (p. 195)

Often written so that most of the statement is true save one small, often trivial bit of information that then makes the whole statement untrue

Encourage guessing, and reward for correct guesses

SHORT-ANSWER QUESTIONS

Advantages

·        Quick and easy to grade

·        Quick and easy to write

·        Disadvantages

 

Encourage students to memorize terms and details, so that their understanding of the content remains superficial

ESSAY QUESTIONS

Advantages

Offer students an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and abilities in a variety of ways

Can be used to develop student writing skills, particularly the ability to formulate arguments supported with reasoning and evidence

Disadvantages

Require extensive time to grade

Encourage use of subjective criteria when assessing answers

If used in class, necessitate quick composition without time for planning or revision, which can result in poor-quality writing

QUESTIONS PROVIDED BY TEST BANKS

Advantages

Save instructors the time and energy involved in writing test questions

Use the terms and methods that are used in the book

Disadvantages

Rarely involve analysis, synthesis, application, or evaluation (cross-discipline research documents that approximately 85 percent of the questions in test banks test recall)

Limit the scope of the exam to text content; if used extensively, may lead students to conclude that the material covered in class is unimportant and irrelevant

We tend to think that these are the only test question options, but there are some interesting variations. The article that promoted this review proposes one: Start with a question, and revise it until it can be answered with one word or a short phrase. Do not list any answer options for that single question, but attach to the exam an alphabetized list of answers. Students select answers from that list. Some of the answers provided may be used more than once, some may not be used, and there are more answers listed than questions. It’s a ratcheted-up version of matching. The approach makes the test more challenging and decreases the chance of getting an answer correct by guessing

 

Q. No. 5     Discuss in detail factors affecting the reliability of test

Ans.

Factors Influencing the Reliability of Test Scores

Some intrinsic and some extrinsic factors have been identified to affect the reliability of test scores.

(A) Intrinsic Factors:

The principal intrinsic factors (i.e. those factors which lie within the test itself) which affect the reliability are:

(i) Length of the Test:

Reliability has a definite relation with the length of the test. The more the number of items the test contains, the greater will be its reliability and vice-versa. Logically, the more sample of items we take of a given area of knowledge, skill and the like, the more reliable the test will be.However, it is difficult to ensure the maximum length of the test to ensure an appropriate value of reliability. The length of the tests in such case should not give rise to fatigue effects in the testees, etc. Thus, it is advisable to use longer tests rather than shorter tests. Shorter tests are less reliable.

The number of times a test should be lengthened to get a desirable level of reliability is given by the formula:

 

Example:

When a test has a reliability of 0.8, the number of items the test has to be lengthened to get a reliability of 0.95 is estimated in the following way:

Hence the test is to be lengthened 4.75 times. However, while lengthening the test one should see that the items added to increase the length of the test must satisfy the conditions such as equal range of difficulty, desired discrimination power and comparability with other test items.

(ii) Homogeneity of Items:

Homogeneity of items has two aspects: item reliability and the homogeneity of traits measured from one item to another. If the items measure different functions and the inter-correlations of items are ‘zero’ or near to it, then the reliability is ‘zero’ or very low and vice-versa.

(iii) Difficulty Value of Items:

The difficulty level and clarity of expression of a test item also affect the reliability of test scores. If the test items are too easy or too difficult for the group members it will tend to produce scores of low reliability. Because both the tests have a restricted spread of scores.

(iv) Discriminative Value:

When items can discriminate well between superior and inferior, the item total-correlation is high, the reliability is also likely to be high and vice-versa.

(v) Test instructions:

Clear and concise instructions increase reliability. Complicated and ambiguous directions give rise to difficulties in understanding the questions and the nature of the response expected from the testee ultimately leading to low reliability.

(vi) Item selection:

If there are too many interdependent items in a test, the reliability is found to be low.

(vii) Reliability of the scorer:

The reliability of the scorer also influences reliability of the test. If he is moody, fluctuating type, the scores will vary from one situation to another. Mistake in him give rises to mistake in the score and thus leads to reliability.

(B) Extrinsic Factors:

The important extrinsic factors (i.e. the factors which remain outside the test itself) influencing the reliability are:

(i) Group variability:

When the group of pupils being tested is homogeneous in ability, the reliability of the test scores is likely to be lowered and vice-versa.

(ii) Guessing and chance errors:

Guessing in test gives rise to increased error variance and as such reduces reliability. For example, in two-alternative response options there is a 50% chance of answering the items correctly in terms of guessing.

(iii) Environmental conditions:

As far as practicable, testing environment should be uniform. Arrangement should be such that light, sound, and other comforts should be equal to all testees, otherwise it will affect the reliability of the test scores.

(iv) Momentary fluctuations:

Momentary fluctuations may raise or lower the reliability of the test scores. Broken pencil, momentary distraction by sudden sound of a train running outside, anxiety regarding non-completion of home-work, mistake in giving the answer and knowing no way to change it are the factors which may affect the reliability of test score.