Issues in assessment

Issues in classroom assessment

The following are some of the major issues in classroom assessment.

1.     Commercialisation of assessment

 Commercialisation of education has become a major issue in our society. As a part of this, commercialisation of assessment is common in the society. Readymade assessment tools and study materials are easily available in the market and most of these tools and materials are not up to the quality. The respective agencies prepared the materials without following any principle. Normally teachers as well as students depend on this type of tools and materials.

 2.     Domain dependency

This issue concerns whether the assessment can be maximally effective if theory and development are focused at a domain – independent level. Assessment requires the interaction of general principles, strategies and techniques with reasonably deep understanding of various domains. This deep understanding includes the processes, strategies and knowledge important for proficiency in a domain. A teacher who has weak domain understanding is less likely to know what questions to ask of students, what to look for in their performance, what inferences to make from that performance about student knowledge and what actions to take to adjust instruction.

3.     Measurement issue   

Educational measurement involves various activities like designing opportunities to gather evidence, collecting evidence, interpreting it and acting on interpretations. Assessment is not simply the elicitation of evidence but also includes making inferences from that evidence. It is an inferential process because we cannot know with certainty what understanding exists inside a student’s head. We can only make estimations based on what we observe from such things as class participation, class work, home work and test performance. We have to observe student behaviour across multiple sources, occasions, and contexts with reasonable consistency. Thus, each teacher-student interaction becomes an opportunity for posing and refining our hypotheses about what a student knows and can do, where he or she needs to improve, and what might be done to achieve that change.  But unfortunately, both the teachers and students are facing issues in the correct measurement of students’ performance.

4.     System issues

Assessment components can be considered internally coherent when they are mutually supportive.  That is, formative and summative assessments need to be aligned with one another. Those components must also be externally coherent in the sense that formative and summative assessments are consistent with accepted theories of learning as well as with socially valued learning outcomes. In any event, if these two types of coherence are not present, components of the system will either work against one another or work against larger societal goals.

But today, for practical reasons, summative tests are relatively short and predominantly take the multiple choice or short answer formats. Those tests will measure a subset of the intended curriculum, omitting important processes, strategies, and knowledge that can not be assessed efficiently in that fashion.

5.     Poor test quality

The class tests made by teachers usually does not maintain the required quality. Most of the teachers are not well versed with the techniques of preparing assessment tools. Conducting assessment using poor quality test will do bad than good.