Principles Of Effective Assessment

Assessment development should consider principles of effective assessment. Principles of assessment include a variety of principles which classified and described in many ways depending on the frame of reference used. According to Linn & Miller (2005), in order to be effective, there are five general principles of assessment to be taken into consideration: the first principle is that clear specification of what to be assessed (learning targets) in the assessment process. This principle requires that the specific description of the characteristics of learning targets to be assessed should be in advance before the selection or development of the assessment procedures. Learning targets could be basic cognitive process dimension of revised Bloom’s

Frequently, assessment methods are selected based on their objectivity, accuracy, or convenience. However, assessment methods are appropriate for some uses and inappropriate for others. In assessing student achievement, it is necessary to match between desired learning goals and the types of assessment method used. When teacher is eager to find students ability to develop and organize ideas and write a well-integrated composition as learning goals, multiple-choice test would be poor choice and other form such as essay writing would be better one. The third principle is that comprehensive assessment requires a variety of assessment method. This principle indicates that none of single types of assessment can test a vast array of learning and development outcomes. The achievement tests such as multiple choice and short answer test are useful to measure knowledge, understanding, and application outcomes, but essay tests and other written projects are more appropriate to assess the capability to express ideas and organize them. Quality assessment uses several different tasks, such as samples of writing, student retellings, records of independent reading, self-evaluations, and checklists. In making these choices, teacher should have a trust on his/her own intuition based on knowledge and observations about students. Beside formal types of

Their suggestions include matching between tasks and desired outcomes, gaining a representative sample of tasks, exclude irrelevant barriers to the performance, and avoiding unintended clues in objective test items. In addition to its validity and reliability, selecting assessment method should be based on kinds of performance to be assessed, whether it is designed to assess knowledge, reasoning, skills, products, and dispositions (Butler & McMunn, 2006). These five areas need different types of assessment methods. When the intention is to assess knowledge, reasoning, and problem solving, then selected response test items can be used to test student mastery of subject matter knowledge (Stiggins, 1995). Selected response test items include multiple-choice, true-false, matching, and fill-in test items. If teacher wants to assess skills, teacher could use a performance method of assessment. Nitko & Brookhart, (2011:249) differ 10 types of performance assessment, namely: structured, on demand tasks, paper-pencil tasks, tasks requiring other equipment and resources, demonstration, typical performance tasks, long-term project, individual and combining group project, experiments, oral presentations and dramatizations, and