Assessment Purposes Strengths and Weaknesses

Educational assessments document the student’s knowledge, skills and abilities, usually in measurable terms. Butler and McMunn (2006) define assessment as the act of collecting information about individuals or groups of individuals to understand them. Student evaluation or assessments and procedures are an ongoing process that includes both formative and summative evaluations.
Both formative and summative evaluation should be conducted to provide accurate feedback on the teaching methods, type of activities used, student response, and as a result, student performance. This paper will present a discussion on the purpose of assessments, and identify their strengths and weaknesses in general terms.
Types, Design and Uses of Assessments
The three types of assessments include student, program, and system assessments (Davis, 1993). Student assessments will assist in identifying their knowledge, their skill and abilities, performance, their applied process or how they go about the tasks of doing their work and their motivation or how he or she felt about his or her work.
The functions of the assessment include diagnostic, formative, and summative. Diagnostic assessments identify knowledge the students need to obtain; formative assessments identify progress in performance; and summative assessments provide a final assessment of progress. Educational assessment provides feedback equitable in regard to student learning, the success of the instructional material and the weak areas requiring attention and revisions (Reynolds, Livingston, & Willson, 2006). Evaluations are mostly a summative process however must also contain elements of formative evaluations (Butler & McMunn, 2006).
Assessment implementation can include many forms, such as day-to-day observation, tests and quizzes, essays, self assessments, and journaling, to name a few. In conducting assessments the following areas should be included; student work at all stages of development, student process, knowledge and skill, programmatic processes, and instructional methods.
During the assessment design process, the teacher determines the basic elements of the assessment. This includes the purpose, either formative or summative, the time frame associated with the assessment, the goals, resources and the type of tool to be used to conduct the assessment (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & William, 2003). Testing should be learner-centered to reflect students' achievement at a point, but cannot be used as a means to evaluate the curriculum. The determination of these elements depends on various factors such as the institutions methodology and goals of learning. Other considerations include, applied learning theories, desired results being sought, the teaching strategies followed, the number of students and the constraints of the educational system, such as the cost and other state and Federal mandates (Pellegrino, Chudowsky, & Glaser, 2001).
The teacher, student, and other stakeholders are all involved in the assessment process, including parents. The results of the assessment are used to improve the focus of the teaching and instructional methods, identify areas of weakness that require improvements related to student knowledge, skills and abilities as well as areas of motivation, improve program planning, and reporting of results.
Teachers can adapt the curriculum to meet their students' need and give appropriate feedback and support to the student as part of the classroom instruction. They can modify the course objectives. This means that, if their class is weak, they have to depend on other materials to bring up their level to the expected level of the class before they can focus on the course objectives. At the same time, if the class is more advanced, the teachers have to make sure the course objectives are met.
How to Improve Assessments
Testing is emotionally charged and anxiety producing but should be effective in motivating, measuring, and reinforcing learning. Tests serve a minimum of four functions. These functions include helping to evaluate and assess whether students are learning what is expected, motivating academic efforts through well designed instruments, improving understanding of the material presented and reinforcing learning through the identification of concepts that still need to be mastered through instruction and assessments (Sadler, 1998).
To improve assessments, teachers should invest adequate amounts of time in the development of their tests. In development, a decision needs to be made whether the test should be helping educators make better instructional decisions and relate this to what the desired outcomes to measure should be. The assessment should be designed to capture the range of difficulty, the needed time associated with the assessment instrument, the format of the assessment, and the desired scoring procedures (Palomta & Banta, 1999).
Assessments should be consistent with the content of the instruction. Assessment content should identify and address the desired student skill level (Jacobs & Chase, 1992). Ideally, the assessment should measure students' academic achievements.

Assessments should be both valid and reliable. When creating an assessment that is reliable and valid, a teacher should use assessment instruments that achieve consistent results and that assess the right information. Validity of assessments method assesses what it claims to assess and thus produces results that can lead to valid inferences usable in decision making.
Reliability is the capacity of an assessment method to perform in a consistent and stable manner (Hargreaves, 2007). Content validity offers a practical approach to assessment development. If assessments are designed to include information in the instructional material in proportion to their importance in the course, then the interpretations of test scores are likely to have greater validity.
Strengths and Weaknesses of Assessments
Student assessment information is used in planning and decision-making that includes the mission and goals of the institution; academic programs; student support services; resource allocation; and faculty evaluation and rewards (Banta, 1985). The results of assessments can be analyzed not only for what they say about individual students but also for what they show about the strengths and weaknesses of a program.
Assessment tools measure the skills and abilities and knowledge attainment of the students in all academic areas and the results serve as a baseline to measure effectiveness of educational programs. A major weakness inherent in educational assessments is the issue of bias.
Bias is inherent in many of the assessment tools and measures that are taken to make assessments reliable and valid, bias may still remain an issue to overcome. Another weakness of assessments can be the cost associated with the development and delivery of the assessment. Finally, but certainly not exhaustive of the assessment weaknesses is the issue of the acceptance of the evaluation results in their ability and use to serve as a baseline to measure effectiveness of educational programs.
Conclusion
Assessment purposes are instrumental in their design. In designing assessments, educators must determine what the intended purpose of the results of the assessment will measure and how this information will be used to shape the programmatic and cognitive learning process directed at student academic achievement.
The decisions consider in educational assessment should include selection, evaluation, and instruction. Additionally, educators must decide whether a relative or absolute interpretation of students’ test results will be most useful. Finally, likely item-content sources must be considered so that tasks eliciting students’ knowledge, skills, and affect can be incorporated into an assessment instrument (Popham, 2006).















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