What do we need to assess?

When you are sitting marking a pile of books, have you ever asked yourself: 'Why am I doing this?'  Why do we engage in assessment at all? Presumably, we assess to find out if learning has taken place. Then we can use the assessment results to ...

• help students learn further
• report on student progress
• make decisions about our teaching

This will enable us to improve the teaching/learning process. 

How do we know if learning has taken place? What do we assess to find out? For example, if a learner can recall facts, it shows us that he has a good memory, but it does not necessarily mean that real learning has taken place. Learning involves using the head (knowledge and thinking skills), the heart (feelings, attitudes and values) and the hands (manual skills). If we want to assess the learning process, we need to assess all these aspects. Tests and exams alone cannot do this. We need to use a variety of assessments. 

Consider the following points about what we assess and how we can assess it:

• We can assess discrete skills, knowledge and attitudes individually, and we can assess complex tasks which involve integrating these. 
• We can assess both formatively and summatively, depending on our needs and the needs of our learners and school communities.
• We can assess by using comments, or by using marks or symbols (qualitatively or quantitatively) or both.
• We can use teacher assessment, self assessment and peer assessment.
• Our assessment can be done formally or informally.
• In outcomes-based assessment, we assess outcomes by comparing the learner outcomes with criteria (sets of descriptions) that have been determined. This is called criterion-referenced assessment.
• Traditional assessment is usually norm-referenced. This means that you compare the performances of all the learners in your class against each other. Learners and parents are interested in how they did in the class and so compare their results to the class average. If all the learners do very well the results can be adjusted - if they all do poorly the marks are increased. What is interesting is how the learner does in relation to the rest of the group (class, grade, whole province etc). Such assessment does not tell us what they are able to do or what outcomes they have achieved - it only tells us how one learners compares to the others. The rank (class position) attained by any single learner is then used to determine that learner's score. Any assessment that involves all learners doing the same thing can be norm referenced.

If we want to use these varied assessments, we need ways of collecting and judging which help us to use them effectively. Learners need to know what will be assessed and how so that they can use this information to guide their learning.