WGU- Educational Assessment Questions and Answers Latest Updated 2022 Rated A

WGU- Educational Assessment Questions and Answers Latest Updated 2022 Rated A General Responsibilities of Ethical Practices 1. Protect the health and safety of all participants 2. Be knowledgeable about and behave in compliance with state and federal laws relevant to the conduct of professional activities 3. Maintain and improve their professional competence in educational assessment 4. Provide assessment services only in areas of their competence and experience, affording full disclosure of their professional qualifications 5. Promote the understanding of sound assessment practices in educations 6. Adhere to the highest standards of conduct and promote professionally responsible conduct with educational institutions and agencies that provide educational services 7. Perform all professional responsibilities with honesty, integrity, due care, and fairness. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) 2002 is a government mandate to schools and states to have ALL children up to grade level with their peers. It set unrealistic goals and penalized schools that did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). The act also required all teachers become "highly qualified". With these new benchmarks and changes to the ways states' addressed education, came increased accountability. Failure could mean a decrease in funding or dissolution of a school/district. Achievement was linked to standardized testing done grades 3-8 and at least one year during high school. Tied achievement to annual standardized tests. These tests are administered to grades 3-8 and at least one year between 9-12th grades. Elementary and Secondary Education Act 1994 (ESEA). Reauthorized Challenging standards were set for student achievement and to develop and administered to "all" students and required that all schools make "Adequate Yearly Practice". It also included "special needs students" in the definition of all students. States were required to set challenging standards for student achievement, and develop and administer assessments to measure student progress towards those standards. Federal laws such as ESEA and IDEA can be seen as legislated attempts to 'raise the bar.' Instruction is most effective when 1. Directed toward a clearly defined set of intended learning outcomes. 2. The methods and materials of instruction are congruent with the outcomes to be achieved. 3. The instruction is designed to fit the characteristics and needs of the students. 4. Instructional decisions are based on information that is meaningful, dependable, and relevant. 5. Students are periodically informed concerning their learning progress. 6. Remediation is provided for students not achieving the intended learning. 7. Instructional effectiveness is periodically reviewed and the intended learning outcomes and instruction modified as needed. Assessment is most effective when 1. Designed to assess a clearly defined set of intended learning outcomes. 2. The nature and function of the assessments are congruent with the outcomes to be assessed. 3. The assessments are designed to fit the relevant student characteristics and are fair to everyone. 4. Assessments provide information that is meaningful, dependable, and relevant. 5. Provision is made for giving the students early feedback of assessment results. 6. Specific learning weaknesses are revealed by the assessment results. 7. Assessment results provide information useful for evaluating the appropriateness of the objectives, the methods, and the materials of instruction. Authentic Assessments A title for performance assessments that stresses the importance of focusing on the application of understandings and skills to real problems in real-world; contextual settings. Achievement Assessment achievement assessment is a broad category that includes all of the various methods for determining the extent to which students are achieving the intended learning outcomes of instruction Alternative Assessments A title for performance assessments that emphasizes that these assessment methods provide an alternative to traditional paper-and-pencil testing. Content standards describe what students should know and be able to do at the end of a specified period of learning (e.g., a grade or series of grades). They provide a framework for curriculum development, instruction, and the assessment of student achievement. Various professional organizations have also developed sets of content standards in their particular subject areas. It is hoped that the use of such standards will raise achievement expectations, increase the quality of public education, provide a better informed citizenship, and make the country more competitive with other countries. Placement Assessment (measures entry behavior) To determine student performance at the beginning of instruction Example: Unit Pre-test Performance-Based Tasks may also be useful for determining entry skills. In the area of writing, for example, obtaining writing samples at the beginning of instruction can establish a base for later assessments of progress. This type of preassessment would be especially valuable if portfolios of student work were to be maintained during the instruction. Formative Assessments (monitors learning progress) To monitor learning progress during instruction Example: End of lesson quiz Diagnostic Assessment (identifies causes of learning problems) To diagnose learning difficulties during instruction Example: Test of math computational skills necessary for learning math Bloom's taxonomy 6. Creating- Putting information together in an innovative way. 5. Evaluating- Making judgments based on a set of guidelines. 4. Analysis- Breaking the concept into parts and understanding 3. Applying- Use knowledge gained in new each part is related to one another. 2. Understanding- making sense of what you have learned. 1. Remembering- recalling relevant knowledge from long term memory. Teachers' Standards for Student Assessment 1. Teachers should be skilled in choosing assessment methods appropriate for instructional decisions. Skill in choosing appropriate, useful, administratively convenient, technically adequate, and fair assessment methods are prerequisite to good use of information to support instructional decisions. 2. Teachers should be skilled in developing assessment methods appropriate for instructional decisions. While teachers often use published or other external assessment tools, the bulk of the assessment information they use for decision making comes from approaches they create and implement. 3. The teacher should be skilled in administering, scoring, and interpreting the results of both externally produced and teacher-produced assessment methods. It is not enough that teachers are able to select and develop good assessment methods; they must also be able to apply them properly. 4. Teachers should be skilled in using assessment results when making decisions about individual students, planning teaching, developing curriculum, and school improvement. Assessment results are used to make educational decisions at several levels: in the classroom about students, in the community about a school and a school district, and in society, generally, about the purposes and outcomes of the educational enterprise. Teachers play a vital role when participating in decision making at each of these levels and must be able to use assessment results effectively. 5. Teachers should be skilled in developing valid pupil grading procedures that use pupil assessments. Grading students is an important part of professional practice for teachers. Grading is defined as indicating both a student's level of performance and a teacher's valuing of that performance. The principles for using assessments to obtain valid grades are known and teachers should employ them. 6. Teachers should be skilled in communicating assessment results to students, parents, other lay audiences, and other educators. Teachers must routinely report assessment results to students and to parents or guardians. In addition, they are frequently asked to report or to discuss assessment results with other educators and with diverse lay audiences. If the results are not communicated effectively, they may be misused or not used. To communicate effectively with others on matters of student assessment, teachers must be able to use assessment terminology appropriately and must be able to articulate the meaning, limitations, and implications of assessment results. 7. Teachers should be skilled in recognizing unethical, illegal, and otherwise inappropriate assessment methods and uses of assessment information. Fairness, the rights of all concerned, and professional ethical behavior must undergird all student assessment activities, from the initial planning for and gathering of information to the interpretation, use, and communication of the results. Selected Response Tests we can obtain a comprehensive coverage of a content domain, and can administer, score, and interpret it easily, but we sacrifice realism and some types of complexity (students are selecting the response: multiple choice, matching, and true/false items) Performance Assessment -high degree of realism -high in complexity of the tasks we can assess - time needed for assessment is frequently excessive and the evaluation of the performance is highly judgmental The purpose of the assessment device is to direct the observation toward the most important elements of the performance and to provide a place to record the judgments. assessments provide direct evidence of valued learning outcomes that cannot be adequately assessed by traditional paper-and-pencil testing, but they are time consuming to use and require greater use of judgment in scoring. Assessments requiring students to demonstrate their achievement of understandings and skills by actually performing a task or set of tasks (e.g., writing a story, giving a speech, conducting an experiment, operating a machine). Guidelines for Effective Student Assessment 1. Effective assessment requires a clear conception of all intended learning outcomes. 2. Effective assessment requires that a variety of assessment procedures be used. 3. Effective assessment requires that the instructional relevance of the procedures be considered. 4. Effective assessment requires an adequate sample of student performance. 5. Effective assessment requires that the procedures be fair to everyone 6. Effective assessment requires the specifications of criteria for judging successful performance. 7. Effective assessment requires feedback to students that emphasizes strengths of performance and weaknesses to be corrected. 8. Effective assessment must be supported by a comprehensive grading and reporting system Domain-Referenced Interpretation Assessment results are interpreted in terms of a relevant and clearly defined set of related tasks (called a domain). Meaning is similar to criterion-referenced interpretation but the term is less used, even though it is a more descriptive term. Content-Referenced Interpretation Essentially the same meaning as domain-referenced interpretation when the content domain is broadly defin