Components of Good Assessment

  Three components of a good assessment are that it uses more than one way to measure progress, it is teacher or grader friendly, and it should match its purpose to the skills actually being assessed. Not all students learn the same and likewise not all students test the same. Some students may be wildly successful on a multiple-choice assessment but struggle with essay questions or vice versa. It is important to not always test in the same styles and to provide more than one type of assessment throughout the unit. For an assessment to be teacher friendly it really just means that the teacher can handle it in an appropriate amount of time from the creation of the test through grading and returning it to the students with appropriate feedback.  The IRIS module mentions that in order for feedback to be of any use to the student they need to receive it back in a timely manner. Otherwise it’s not really going to benefit them in that particular class anyway. So if the teacher has 300 students in a lecture hall and three other classes added to that, he or she may give out a lot more multiple choice or computer generated assessments rather than grade 900 essay assessments. The third component is one that the module explained to be that if the teacher is checking to see if the students have memorized rote facts a multiple-choice test may be more appropriate than an essay test where the students can kind of weave all sorts of irrelevant information into their explanations. Likewise, it is very difficult to see if the students can apply their knowledge using only multiple-choice questions (even if they are everyone’s favorite)!