Chapter 1: Review of Principles of High Quality Assessment

The first chapter of the Assessment of Learning II was basically a rundown of the terms that
we've already encountered or discussed in Assessment of Learning I last semester. It's a review
and at the same time, it acted out as a self-study of how you learned about assessment as a
whole. Generally speaking, some of us (including me) still had questions and clarifications that
needed to be raised about the real meaning of assessment, measurement, evaluation, test,
validity, and reliability.
Since they can be interchangeable sometimes, the reporters discussed their key differences and
they impact in assessing a student's progress or learning. According to Study.com, Assessment
is a key component of learning because it helps students learn. When students are able to see
how they are doing in a class, they are able to determine whether or not they understand
course material. Assessment can also help motivate students. If students know they are doing
poorly, they may begin to work harder.
As mentioned earlier, I am one of those learnings who had a hard time grasping the core
difference between evaluation and assessment, but during the review of terminology, I have
learned that the purpose of assessment is formative, i.e. to increase quality whereas evaluation
is all about judging quality, therefore the purpose is summative. Assessment is concerned with
process, while evaluation focuses on product.
As a future educator, it is simply importance to ensure that the students are learning from us,
and one way of ensuring that is by creating tests and activities that would assess properly their
learnings and that it would produce something that we can efficiently and effectively evaluate.
If there's something that I would take from this discussion, that would be this piece of
knowledge from Dylan William's book Embedded Formative Assessment:
“The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer
effective learning environments for the students. The key features of effective learning
environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learners, and their
peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. The only way we can
do this is through assessment. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching
and learning.”