There are more ways to assess learning than you think

As part of my research at UVA's education and business schools, I spent time looking at the various ways organizations assess learners. I wrote a paper to outline the various assessment strategies and tactics available to organizations across the education and training spectrum. The paper first provides some structure to the complexity of assessment, then provides a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of assessment approaches. Below is a preview to the full article (13 min read), which you can find on Medium.

Preview: Assessment in Lifelong Learning

The rise in new learning platforms has dramatically increased the number of people creating educational content. Platforms like Udemy, Pluralsight, Coursera, and even Youtube allow individuals and organizations to create online courses and open them up to the masses. The assessment quality and approaches vary between platforms and courses as content creates take on assessment creation tasks. The purpose of this document is to shed light on effective assessment approaches to allow instructors across platforms to evaluate and improve their assessments. I’ll start by describing four criteria that all assessments should meet, regardless of the assessment type. Next, I’ll define and discuss the various assessment types and attributes and provide an approach evaluating assessments of various types and attributes. Lastly, I’ll apply this framework to Udacity, an online learning platform, and provide recommendations for improving the implementation if its assessments.

Effective Assessment

Despite the wide variety of types of assessment, some assessment qualities apply to assessments of all shapes and sizes. All assessments should be valid, reliable, provide feedback, and have clear evaluation criteria. 

Assessment validity refers to “how well a test measures what it is purported to measure.” For example, if an exam is intended to measure a students ability to think creatively or critically, it should not simply measure a students knowledge of creativity and creative thinking. The exam is intended to measure ability, so should require a demonstration of ability.

Assessment reliability refers to “the degree to which an assessment tool produces stable and consistent results.” This means that assessment results should not be overly influenced by chance or subjectivity.

Regardless of the purpose of the assessment, students should receive feedback to aid in their continued learning and either make them more capable of taking on future tasks or surface areas for development.

Clear and objective evaluation criteria in all types of assessment supports validity by giving instructors a clear place to align evaluation criteria with learning objectives. They support and reliability by reducing the effect of misunderstood expectations or subjective grading. Lastly, it improves the learning experience for students by reducing ambiguity and misunderstanding. From simple True/False questions to hands-on, real work projects, organizations take a highly diverse set of approachings to assessment. To help navigate this complexity, I categorized the various

The Four Dimensions of Assessment

In my research, I discovered four important dimensions of assessments: assessment purpose, assessment format, assessment grader, and assessment standard. Within each of these dimensions, assessments fall into different categories. Below is the list of dimensions with their corresponding categories.

• Purpose: pre-assessment, summative, formative
• Format: choice, source, performance
• Assessor: auto, self, peer, expert
• Standard: norm, criteria, ipsative

Effective assessment can look quite different among the various combinations of these dimensions and categories. For example, writing a high-quality assessment that is formative, multiple-choice, auto-graded, and norm-based will be a very different process than creating a summative, performance-based, expert-assessed, criteria based project. In this section, I will define each of these dimensions and categories, summarize the research on their effect on learning, and describe attributes that demonstrate quality.

Continue reading here: https://medium.com/@samueldnelson/assessment-in-lifelong-learning-b188a7ec039f