Posted by SusanHorowitz

June 18, 2009, 12:36 pm

Before we investigate how teachers and schools can use assessment data to track student progress, we must first define assessment. Assessment is any form of diagnostic, formative, or summative evaluation of a student’s knowledge, performance, and learning. Testing, the most common form of assessment, is only one in a broad spectrum of acceptable assessments (Stephens et al., 1995)1. Any form of oral interaction, documented classroom observation, student work sample, student interview, quiz, classroom test, criterion-referenced test, or standardized test is valuable assessment. All of these forms should be used in tandem with each other because “use of a single formative assessment to measure students’ reading progress is not as reliable as using multiple, different assessments to triangulate on the complex concept of student reading” (McLeod, 2005, p.3).

Assessment is a way for teachers to measure what students “are able to do and what they need to learn” (Opitz & Ford, 2006, p.814) and is the most pivotal aspect of a successful classroom because teachers “need to know about their pupils’ progress and difficulties with learning so that they can adapt their own work to meet pupils’ needs” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p.139).

If you wish to add to or change this definition of assessment, please respond to this posting. Otherwise, this will be the working definition of assessment throughout the remainder of this series.

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