An assessment system includes the tools, rules and policies for student assessment in an education system. Describe the assessment system in the Anglophone Caribbean. What are the types? What are the purposes? Are some purposes and types missing?

a. There are benefits of considering systems rather than components because each component might have a different role in directing whole system reform.

b. It will avoid focusing on one component, which ha occurred even in some high performing systems.



Analytical questions

•Are the assessments now used for monitoring learning in Trinidad and Tobago sufficient and fit for purpose?

•Are assessments used to support and promote learning adequate and fit for purpose?

•Do the different assessments fit together and feed into each other while providing sufficient information on each purpose?



A balanced, comprehemsive and coherent assessment system

High quality assessment systems are comprehensive, balanced, and coherent; they supply information for a variety of purposes and are fit for purpose.

•Balance and coherence are the key qualities required as described by US experts Stiggins, Shepard, and Darling-Hammond.

•Such systems promote and enhance high quality learning.  Assessment tools cohere with multiple assessments for different purposes.

What Does it Look Like?



Please See

Michigan Department of Education

Please Read

Using Balanced Assessment Systems To Improve Student Learning and School Capacity: An Introduction

Please Read

Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind

Please View

-Video by Lorna Earl-Rethinking Classroom Assessment with purpose in mind

Link

Purpose is critical to assessment. Although there are multiple purposes, Black (1998) originally identified (1) selection and certification; (2) monitoring and accountability; and (3) promoting and supporting student learning. Is there a summative purpose? Newton addresses this issue-

In drawing a distinction between summative and formative, it has often seemed that scholars are comparing assessment purposes at the decision level, since the distinction has typically been drawn to foreground the formative purpose. Yet, when referring to the alleged summative purpose, the same researchers tend simply to use the term as a catch-all expression for categorizing any of a variety of different purposes which are predicated on the use of individual summative assessment judgements. The term ‘summative’ basically evokes the nature of the assessment judgement typically used to support these purposes: a summing up. What it does not do is to highlight anything more significant about them. (page 156)

Do you agree? How is this confusion apparent in CAC and CSEC documents?

What about grading as a purpose? Newton continues . . .

It is not uncommon for grading to be cited as a specific assessment purpose (at the decision level). This is unhelpful, though, since a grade is a type of assessment judgement and ‘grading’ is the process of assigning a grade. Grading is not a discrete use to which an assessment judgement can be put; it is a term that has application only at the judgement level. In response, it might be argued that the term ‘grading’ often denotes both a process and a purpose. However, if so, then exactly what purpose or, perhaps, which purposes? Any purpose that is based on the use of a grade? Any purpose that is not formative? (page 156-157)

Consider this-is grading incompatible with formative purposes? Always, sometimes, rarely? What is the essence of the meaning of each practice? How might purpose modify the practice?

Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs

First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?

Black, P. (1998). Testing: Friend or foe? London: Falmer Press.

Newton, P. (2007). Clarifying the purposes of education assessment. Assessment in Education: Principles,Policy & Practice, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 149 – 170.

Newton's List of purposes

(1) Social evaluation uses
(2) Formative uses
(3) Student monitoring uses
(4) Transfer uses
(5) Placement uses
(6) Diagnosis uses
(7) Guidance uses
(8) Qualification uses
(9) Selection uses
(10) Licensing uses
(11) School choice uses
(12) Institution monitoring uses
(13) Resource allocation uses

(14)Organizational intervention uses
(15)Programme evaluation uses
(16)System monitoring uses
(17)Comparability uses
(18)National accounting uses

Which purposes are suitable/appropriate for national assessments of learning?

SABER COUNTRY REPORTS ON ASSESSMENT

ZAMBIA

GHANA

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

LEBANON

SRI LANKA