Guy Sander, Samantha Fetherstonhaugh, Sean Tomlin

Our group believes the issues to consider for best practice in assessment would include emphasis on the following.

The assessment needs to be valid otherwise the assessment won’t support the intended learning outcome. The issue is that the assessor will gain false information and draw incorrect conclusions about the skills, knowledge and attitudes of the student. The teacher will not get truthful feedback about whether their teaching practice is working and remain ignorant. The consequence for the student is that they may become disillusioned as they struggle with higher learning levels that are based on learning and understanding from the first level. This doesn’t show fairness to the student.

The assessment needs to be equitable and should provide a range of different assessment tasks to provide each student with the opportunity to perform at their best. This issue would be that the student is assessed poorly because they perform poorly in written tests where their English is poor but perform better in a debate.

It should also be incremental because the teacher can see the competency of the student at various stages as the students learning is scaffolded.

Assessment should also be summative and formative for best practice. Formative enables the student and teacher to receive feedback. The student receives feedback on their learning (or where they are) and for the teacher as to whether their teaching strategies and level of engagement are working. Summative assessment also informs how well the student has learnt. As the teacher you want the student to learn from the assessment. It’s a wasted time if they don’t learn during the actual assessment procedure.  Hence, summative assessment can also be used for further learning if the teacher gives feedback on the assessment (formative). This can help motivating students to learn and cause less stress for the student and teacher. Example: After every weekly topic, the teacher assesses student learning by spot tests that aren’t graded but feedback is given (formative). Following 5 weeks of feedback given from practice tests (formative) covering 5 topics there is a final assessment (summative). The teacher provides feedback on the final assessment (formative).