1.

1. Don't rush.

Assessments that are thrown together at the last minute invariably include flaws that
greatly affect the fairness, accuracy, and usefulness of the resulting evidence.

2. Plan Your Assessments carefully.

Aim not only to access your key learning goals but to do so in a balanced,
representative way. If your key learning goals are that students should understand what
happened during a certain historical period and evaluate the decisions made by key
figures during that period, for example, your test should balance questions on basic
conceptual understanding with questions assessing evaluation skills.

3. Aim for Assignments and Questions That Are Crystal clear.

If students find the question difficult to understand, they may answer what they think is
the spirit of the question rather than the question itself, which may not match your intent.

4. Guard Against Unintended bias.

A fair and unbiased assessment uses contexts that are equally familiar to all and uses
words that have common meanings to all. A test question on quantitative skills that asks
students to analyze football statistics might not be fair to women, and using scenarios
involving farming may be biased against students from urban areas, unless you are
specifically assessing student learning in these contexts.

5. Ask a Variety of People With Diverse Perspectives to Review

Assessment tools.

This helps ensure that the tools are clear, that they appear to assess what you want
them to, and that they don't favor students of a particular background.
 Traditional Grading System Standards-Based Grading System

1. Based on assessment methods (quizzes, tests, homework, projects, 1. Based on learning goals and performance standards. One
etc.). One grade/entry is given per assessment. grade/entry is given per learning goal.

2. Assessments are based on a percentage system. Criteria for success 2. Standards are criterion or proficiency-based. Criteria and
may be unclear. targets are made available to students ahead of time.

3. Use an uncertain mix of assessment, achievement, effort, and behavior 3. Measures achievement only OR separates achievement
to determine the final grade. May use late penalties and extra credit. from effort/behavior. No penalties or extra credit given.

4. Selected assessments (tests, quizzes, projects, etc.) are

4. Everything goes in the grade book – regardless of purpose.
used for grading purposes.

5. Include every score, regardless of when it was collected. Assessments 5. Emphasize the most recent evidence of learning when
record the average – not the best – work. grading.

2.

3. An OBE curriculum means starting with a clear picture of what is important for students to be able to do,
then organizing the curriculum, instruction and assessment to make sure this learning ultimately happens. The
four basic principles are (Spady, 1994):

 Clarity of focus

This means that everything teachers do must be clearly focused on what they want students to know,
understand and be able to do. In other words, teachers should focus on helping students to develop the
knowledge, skills and personalities that will enable them to achieve the intended outcomes that have been
clearly articulated.

 Designing down

It means that the curriculum design must start with a clear definition of the intended outcomes that students
are to achieve by the end of the program. Once this has been done, all instructional decisions are then made
to ensure achieve this desired end result.

 High expectations

It means that teachers should establish high, challenging standards of performance in order to encourage
students to engage deeply in what they are learning. Helping students to achieve high standards is linked very
closely with the idea that successful learning promotes more successful learning.

 Expanded opportunities
Teachers must strive to provide expanded opportunities for all students. This principle is based on the idea that
not all learners can learn the same thing in the same way and in the same time. However, most students can
achieve high standards if they are given appropriate opportunities.

4. Item response theory (IRT) was first proposed in the field of psychometrics for the purpose of ability
assessment. It is widely used in education to calibrate and evaluate items in tests, questionnaires, and
other instruments and to score subjects on their abilities, attitudes, or other latent traits. During the last
several decades, educational assessment has used more and more IRT-based techniques to develop
tests. Today, all major educational tests, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and Graduate Record
Examination (GRE), are developed by using item response theory, because the methodology can
significantly improve measurement accuracy and reliability while providing potentially significant
reductions in assessment time and effort, especially via computerized adaptive testing. In recent years,
IRT-based models have also become increasingly popular in health outcomes, quality-of-life research,
and clinical research