Wasima Nahrin 15th Batch Course no & title: EER-582: Assessment and Evaluation Technique in Education Department of Educational

Evaluation and Research Institute of Education and Research University of Dhaka

The nature of specific assessment techniques

Assessment techniques are, very simply, instruments to measure students performance. So, it can easily be assumed that like any other tool, it too is most effective when used properly and can be very counterproductive if used otherwise. Author Derek Rowntree has discussed the consequences of misapplication of various assessment techniques in the section The nature of specific assessment techniques of his book Assessing Students: How Shall We Know Them? Rowntree has spoken about two different misapplications of assessment techniques: 1. Overuse of any specific assessment technique. 2. Inappropriate application of an assessment technique.

Overuse of any specific assessment technique: Human brain gets habituated real fast. If the brain repeatedly functions the same thing for a prolonged time, it loses the capability to think otherwise and programs itself to do things in that specific way. The same thing happens when a single type of assessment gets entirely relied upon to measure students capabilities. Easy to explain with the example author has used: Suppose, a teaching-learning system is entirely relied upon Multiple Choice Test, the students will grow a habit of scanning the learning experience only for factual, testable items, gobbets of detail or technical terms, rather than looking for the larger, encompassing insights. The example continues with what Jacques Barzun said in his foreword to a book The Tyranny of Testing that, if a student cannot develop a habit of organizing their thought and explaining what s/he has learned to another person, it means he has reached nowhere with their learning.

Inappropriate application of an assessment technique: A test generally is developed to measure specific characteristics and to predict specific performance criteria for a particular group. It might run into

side effects if inappropriately used. For example, a test with items designed to select salespersons may not be valid for identifying good sales managers. Rowntree has drawn the case of imperial Chinese government and the essay assessment to explain how an inappropriate assessment technique, very much irrelevant to the job applied for, survived in the mainstream assessment system. The author has also shared his not being much confident about the traditional essay type questions. According to his saying, this type of writing does not relate much to what actually is necessary. This format might be easy to score by the examiners but it can devalue many invaluable skills and humane gifts that children have (e.g. conversation, acting, debating, team-work), simply because they are not assessable in written form.

Assessment is not a mere series of questions that are asked to pupil to measure their learning, rather its a process that guides the path which the teaching-learning process will follow. A single test cannot be expected to be valid in all situations and for all groups of people. So, before using an assessment technique, the context must be measured and analyzed so that it can be utilized to its highest benefit.