Introduction to Educational Assessment

In order to improve education, many schools and universities have adopted what's known as "educational assessment." Educational assessment is a method of documenting and tracking several key factors in education, most notably the skills, knowledge, and attitudes of every component of the educational system: The student The faculty Student groups The school itself The focus of educational assessment is technically on the student. But the reality of the educational system is that every component within that system plays a role in student outcomes, so any and all factors that contribute to student success are included in these types of assessments. Assessment is an ongoing process, and one where each factor leads to the next.

Generally educational assessment follows the following formula: Those involved in assessment take time to state the goals of the program. They need to figure out their intended outcomes, and be related specifically to the cure function of the program or group. Once the goals of the program have been established, those in assessment start to gather evidence and data, looking at achievement objectives and see where they expect that data to be in the future.

They also figure out where they'll draw data from in order to measure their intended outcomes. For some period of time, the school will start to collect the data. After a set time period, those in assessment will evaluate whether the objective has been achieved by the institution.

Afterward the group will gather together to see where improvements can be made, the budget necessary for those improvements, recommendations for faculty and staff and so on. Finally, the recommended changes will be implemented. And the objectives will be revised, and the process will start over.

Understanding assessment takes some time and training, but it's a crucial part of developing strategies for student achievement. In order to understand assessment, let's look at each part as it would be completed by a school interested in improving student outcomes.

Learning Academy, a fictional school located in Bethesda, Maryland, has decided to become more interested and involved with student assessment. The heads of the math department have come together over the course of a few meetings and have decided on a few goals that they'd like those enrolled in their math programs to meet. These include: Improving Teamwork Skills Improving Communication Skills Improve Ability of Students to Apply Mathematical Knowledge to Real Life Situations Generally, these ideas come from the program heads themselves as a result of brainstorming sessions.

But surveys, focus groups, and other data collection methods may be employed in order to ensure that the outcomes are both plausible and beneficial. Also, remember that these ideas need to be measurable. It's not uncommon for those working in assessment to come up with ideas that are simply not possible to measure, and without metrics the assessment programs can't monitor success.

Once those involved in the Learning Academy assessment group have agreed upon these objectives, it's time to come up with measurements and data in order to assess outcomes.

Once these proposed outcomes have been established, it's time to figure out how they'll be measured. Each school needs to carefully devise a plan that will provide some sort of reasonable analytics that can be used to track student progress and measure outcomes. Examples may be: Teamwork – Faculty at Learning Academy want to measure that students are working better as a team.

They can do this by first integrating more group assignments into the curriculum, and – at the end of every group assignment – disseminating some type of data collection method asking students whether or not they felt they worked well together in the core components of teamwork. If improvement is seen or the final scores are within the range that the group considers ideal, this will be a success. Further years may not need two or more teamwork building exercises because they can be compared to previous years' data, but two or more may still be advantageous to note changes between groups.

Communication – Communication may be more difficult to measure objectively, but subjective measurements from a group can still be beneficial. One method that Learning Academy can use to measure communication ability is to have students write paper on mathematical knowledge, in order to get a better idea of whether or not the individual is successfully communicating their mathematical knowledge into words. Another may be to hold a presentation and have faculty rate the success of the student's presentation, which can then be compared year to year or used as a baseline to discuss whether or not communication skills is an important part of mathematical outcomes.

Another method would be to embed a question in a math test that alone could be used to assess communication skills. Regardless of the choices, specific goals need to be stated (Quality grammar, clear sense of ability, spelling, etc.) in order to create effective measurements and monitor outcomes. Applying Mathematical Knowledge – Measuring applied mathematical knowledge may be easier to measure objectively.

Tests can easily be created that take the mathematics that the student has learned in class and place them in real life settings. Scores on these tests can be compared to the student's baseline of test scores, or they can be looked at independently as a measurement of the ability for students to apply math to real life settings. There's a lot of room here for faculty and staff to make adjustments and guesses as to what they think are best for student outcomes.

The subjectivity in some of these measurements can be a problem, so ensuring that faculty and staff are trained to look at these issues on a more objective level is important. Part of goal creation may be to measure student success within this current class, but other goals may be long term. Learning Academy may hope to simply get an idea of how the students are currently doing based on the classes they've taken, and only at the end will they use those ideas to craft more specific strategies for addressing student needs – if they decide these strategies are needed at all.

For example, a school may decide to measure teamwork ability out of curiosity, because they believe that this is an important skill for students to have. They may decide to only create one project that involves teamwork in their curriculum, and when they measure student outcomes, they find that students seemed to have quality teamwork scores. They may decide at this point that no changes need to be implemented.

They may even see low scores, but decide teamwork isn't important. It's up to faculty and staff to figure out what is best for the students and what changes will need to be made to bring about the best outcomes. All of this is discussed by those involved in assessment.

Like any study, a period of time is dedicated to simply collecting data. Depending on the issues that are being addressed, you may wait an entire semester or as little as a few days. It depends on what you're hoping to measure and when you plan on initiating changes.

Most schools make assessments after an entire year or after a semester/quarter. It depends on the age of the students, type of school, and politics involved. Regardless, during this time data is collected, and faculty and staff move on towards evaluating the data.

The faculty then looks at the data and interprets it. If possible, the data is compared against a baseline – especially for long term assessments where the goal is tracking progress over time. In the case of Learning Academy, this is the first year they've completed assessments, so the most likely step is to look over what the data says and figure out next steps.

We'll assume the outcomes are as follows: Communication – Learning Academy found that scores were very low for communication amongst math students. Teamwork – Learning Academy found that scores were neither bad nor good for teamwork amongst math students. Applying Mathematical Knowledge – Learning Academy found that the scores were good, but could be improved.

They go over these outcomes in a meeting. They decide that communication is a problem. Even though most math takes place on pen and paper, the ability to communicate (and the ability to communicate your knowledge of math) is important for these students' success.

They craft up a recommendation. They start by initiating a discussion among math instructors on how best to compose informative and helpful writing assignments that will give these students more experience to draw from in order to improve their communication skills. The Center for Research on Teaching Excellence is a good source to consult for this information.

They then create guidelines to frame future writing assignments, include more writing assignments in their curriculum, and decide to require a new English course that focuses on writing about math (and other subjects) before they're allowed to take the specific math class. They may also request that more presentations and papers be added to other courses beyond the math class in order to facilitate greater learning in communications. For teamwork, the group may decide to do nothing at all.

They may decide that teamwork is not an important skill for those in math, or something that math teachers should be in charge of dealing with. Nevertheless, it's not unlikely for the group to craft recommendations or seek feedback on whether or not teamwork is an important principle, whether it should be measured, etc. For applied mathematical knowledge, the course scores indicate favorable training.

The recommendations may focus on the idea that sweeping changes are unnecessarily, but that lesser changes may be key to improving on those numbers. They may craft some strategies for training students to apply their math knowledge better, or simply continue onward to see if it is a trend or an outlier. They may also breakdown the data into groups for better feedback.

All recommendations are then sent to someone in the upper levels of the school, such as a dean or a principle, and reviewed. Once reviewed, the process begins again, and Learning Academy will see if their recommendations have produced any measurable results.

These types of assessments play a crucial and valuable role in the success of modern education institutions. From elementary schools to some of the world's leading colleges, more and more organizations are finding that educational assessment is the key to improving the short and long term success of their students, and the commitment to this type of research can play a significant role in your ability to compete with the best schools in your area.