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Suggested Citation:"INTRODUCTION." National Research Council. 2001. Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10019.
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INTRODUCTION

Part III sets forth the foundations for educational assessment in terms of contemporary scientific understanding of the nature of human cognition and methods of measurement. These two bodies of knowledge jointly provide a set of principles and methods for assessment design and use. As in any design activity, the scientific foundations provide direction and constrain the set of choices and possibilities, but they do not prescribe the exact nature of the design, nor do they preclude ingenuity to achieve a final product. Design is always a complex process that, while guided by theory and research, involves optimatization under a series of practical constraints outside the realm of science. Thus the design is influenced in important ways by the purpose of the assessment (e.g., to assist learning, measure individual attainment, or evaluate a program), the context in which it will be used (classroom or large-scale), and practical constraints (e.g., resources and time). The following chapters explore issues of how the foundations play out in the design of real assessment situations. A variety of existing assessments are described to illustrate the points.

Chapter 5 presents features of a new approach to assessment design that capitalizes on the scientific advances described in Part II. Using the assessment triangle defined in Chapter 2 as a framework, we discuss various aspects of design—including identification of the targets for assessment, item and test design, validation, reporting, and fairness—always focusing on how a cognitive approach to design would differ from current approaches.

Chapter 6 broadens the discussion beyond assessment to explore the interactions of assessment with curriculum and instruction; how assessments could best be used to support learning, first in classroom contexts and second in large-scale contexts; and the need for systems of multiple assessments that would work together to help achieve a common set of learning goals.

Chapter 7 considers the role current and future information technologies could play in realizing the full potential of the new kinds of assessment the committee envisions. Technology is enabling the assessment of a wider array of performances and simultaneously changing the nature of learning environments and the potential targets of assessment. The opportunities as well as the challenges are considered.

Two kinds of suggestions are presented in these chapters. Some relate to how scientific developments in the foundational areas of cognition and measurement could improve assessment. Others involve changes that could be made to the educational system to accommodate effective use of these assessments. Many of the suggestions in this latter area are consistent with the scientific developments, but those developments themselves are not sufficient to determine how educational systems should function. Political and societal decisions come into play with regard to organizational changes, resource implications, and investment priorities, and the committee recognizes that these are issues on which knowledgeable people may disagree.

Suggested Citation:"INTRODUCTION." National Research Council. 2001. Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10019.
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Five key features of a new approach to assessment design serve as the organizing themes for this chapter:

  • A model of cognition and learning, or a description of how people represent knowledge and develop competence in a subject domain, is a cornerstone of the assessment development enterprise. Unfortunately, the model of learning is not made explicit in most assessment development efforts, is not empirically derived, and/or is impoverished relative to what it could be.

  • To increase the chances of collecting evidence that supports the types of inferences one wants to draw, the design and selection of assessment tasks, along with the procedures for evaluating students’ responses, should be guided jointly by the cognition and interpretation elements of the assessment triangle. An assessment should be more than a collection of tasks that work well individually. The utility of assessment information can be enhanced by considering how to design and/or select tasks so that the information derived from them can be combined to support the desired inferences.

  • The process of construct validation during test design should rest, in part, on evidence that tasks actually tap the cognitive content and processes intended.

  • Although reporting of results occurs at the end of an assessment cycle, assessments must be designed from the beginning to ensure that reporting of the desired types of information will be possible and effective. When results are reported, well-delineated descriptions of learning in the domain are key to their effectiveness for communicating about student performance.

  • Fairness in testing is defined in many ways, but at its core is the idea of comparable validity: a fair assessment is one that yields comparably valid inferences from person to person and group to group. One way of thinking about fairness is to take into account individual learners’ instructional histories when designing an assessment.

Suggested Citation:"INTRODUCTION." National Research Council. 2001. Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10019.
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Page 175
Suggested Citation:"INTRODUCTION." National Research Council. 2001. Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10019.
×
Page 176
Next: 5 Implications of the New Foundations for Assessment Design »
Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment Get This Book
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Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education.

The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective?

At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning.

Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored.

With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

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