Curriculum Assessment-Know of the Qualities of a Good Assessment Practice
Assessment is such an integral process in the educational cycle. By and large, assessment serves to ensure that learners receive the specific, constructive and timely feedback on their progress as far as their time and investment in school goes.
By general definition, assessment can be said to be the process of gathering and discussing information that may be from multiple sources all for the sake of developing a deeper understanding of what the students or learners have understood and what it is that they can do with the knowledge they have had from their educational experiences. This entire process comes to an end when the assessment results are used to improve the subsequent learning processes and curriculum development in general.
As such a professional in the educational sphere, the choice of an assessment tool lies at the heart of your curriculum planning. These are the very tools that will be employed to drive student learning and they will be the ones that you will use to attract the student’s attention anyway.
Assessment methods come of various kinds. By and large, there are four things that you need to consider when designing an appropriate assessment method that will actually reflect your very established learning goals and activities. These are; reliability, standardization, practicality and validity. Below is a look at these various aspects one by one.
When it comes to reliability, this is generally the extent to which a questionnaire, a test, observation or any other measurement procedure will be able to produce the same results over an extended period of time. And talking of standardization, this sets a given precedence as such boosting an assignment, test or the reliability of projects. And then when we look at validity, this can be said to be the extent to which an instrument actually measures what it has been set to measure. As a result of this, educationists need to clearly have identified the very anticipated learning outcomes and objectives of the various courses so as to be able to appropriately assess the student’s progress and work. And when we come to practicality aspect of an assessment method, this is the action of the assessment method and the relevance that it has to the overall learning goals of the course or program. Practicality as well should address the nature of the workload of the instructor and see whether it is reasonable or not.
A good curriculum assessment procedure should as well provide the learners with the necessary feedback. Of course, learners want to have some feedback on how they do fair with their program at the end of each learning session, such as termly and at the end of the academic year. And this should be timely for where it is not timely, the learners will be unable to go forward with the focus that they require so as to achieve the success that they need from the course results. As such, you need to ensure that you are providing learners with feedback and not just provide, but as well see to it that the feedback is timely.