Student knowledge of learning expectations and assessment

OBJECTIVE: is not to fool or trick students or to outguess them on the assessment. Rather,
be very clear and specific about the learning expectation

Public – students know the content and scoring criteria before the assessment and often
before instruction

Way to help students is to give

·       Assessment blueprint
·       Sample questions
·       Example from previous students work

Learning goal – mastering task, developing new skills and improving competence and
understanding

Performance goal – perform to get a grade, recognition or reward and students are not as
engaged
Opportunity to learn 

given sufficient time and opportunities for all students to learn

Prerequisite knowledge and skills 

it is unfair to assess students on things that require prerequisite knowledge or skill that they
do not possess

1.     Understand students prerequisites that they demonstrate

2.     Carefully check your own assessments to see the prerequisites that are required

Test-taking skills (TIPS)

1.     Read directions carefully

2.     Pacing
3.     Initially bypassing difficult items
4.     Checking answers
5.     Eliminating wrong answers to multiple choice items ( rather than looking for the right
answer)

Skills/tips to make sure students have or acquire

Avoiding student stereotyping    

it is our responsibility to judge each student on his or her performance on assessment tasks,
not how others who share characteristics of the student perform
Avoiding bias in assessment tasks and procedures 

two major forms of assessment bias

1.     Offensiveness
2.     Unfair penalization

Offensiveness – occurs if the content of the assessment offends, upsets, distresses, angers or
otherwise creates negative effect for particular students or subgroup of students

Unfair penalization - is bias that creates a disadvantage for students because of content that
makes it more difficult for students from same groups to perform compared to students from
other groups