Classroom Assessment

Designed for students taking a first course in classroom measurement and assessment, this text shows how assessment principles apply to the full range of teacher decision-making, not just to the formal evaluation of pupil learning. It is organized in a manner that follows the natural progression of teacher decision-making: from organizing the class as a social system to planning and conducting instruction to the formal evaluation of learning and, finally, to grading. The focus is on the realities of classrooms and how assessment techniques can better serve those realities. This focus on the classroom realities that surround and shape teacher assessments is illustrated by examples and quotes from real classroom teachers. A section of each chapter is devoted to practical guidelines for conducting the type of assessment (informal, performance, paper and pencil tests) under discussion. The dangers of ignoring recommendations are also described. Discussion of two central concepts - validity and reliability - is introduced in chapter 1 and is then linked in later chapters to each specific type of assessment information. Practical strategies for improving the validity and reliability of various assessment techniques are also presented in each chapter. This edition contains a new section that compares and contrasts definitions of testing, measurement, assessment and evaluation. New topics to this edition are: questioning, portfolio assessment, co-operative learning, basic statistics and item difficulty/discrimination.