Testing, Or Summative Assessment - 1473 Words

â€Å"Assessment as a practice is expansive and dynamic, reflecting learning in action. Testing, in contrast, is more about measuring a body of knowledge that has been taught.† (Meadmore, 2004, p.3) Testing, or summative assessment, is a process of measuring attainment of knowledge and understanding by assigning an â€Å"empirical indicant† (Carmines Zeller, 1979, p.45) which purports to represent the degree to which students’ learning reflects the course objectives. Testing creates a quantifiable consequence from a qualitative construct, and this result becomes part of a student’s identity. While the assessment instrument described for this unit is a summative assessment in that the marks will be recorded and contribute to the students’†¦show more content†¦Interpretations and implications of test scores must be considered in this important context. When giving weight to test scores, it is also important that the assessment instrument reflects students achieving targets not comparisons within the cohort (Hart, 2000, p. 100), which is to say that the assessment is criterion based, not norm based. The assessment in this unit consists of two tasks which together provide a valid, reliable and authentic summative assessment of students leaning. The exam is scheduled 4 weeks into the unit and reinforces and tests understanding of basic knowledge and mathematical fluency. Some questions extend into application with simple modeling problems that are interpreted before being solved mathematically. This modeling aspect brings authenticity to the unit and to the assessment instrument. The assignment will be issued along with the feedback on their exams in the 5th week. It is a modeling problem in two parts, and both are highly practical and authentic. The knowledge they need in order to solve the assignment questions is a direct and clear extension of the exam content which was explicitly taught in the first 4 weeks of the course and practiced with examples and applications in the subsequent 2 weeks. Reliability refers to the characteristic that the assessment precisely and consistently measures the targeted learning (Black, 2013). The unit was planned through backward