How do you see assessment

How do you see assessment

A) Measurement
B) Inquiry

A) MEASUREMENT
If you go for ‘measurement’ it means you see assessment as the act or process of determining, calculating or estimating the amount, or level of a student’s ‘learning’. We normally used tests as tools in doing so. One of the aims of measurement is to make comparisons among students and it is often used for standardizations.

When you understand assessment as measurement you use tests as instruments to measure student’s learning and progress and you are producing data that can be summarised in terms of quantity or level. If the belief is that assessment is to be used to report the amount or level of a student’s ‘learning’ then in terms of beliefs about knowledge, these assessments belong within the measurement paradigm.

B) INQUIRY

However, if you think of assessment as ‘inquiry’ you are actually searching or investigating. For many definitions among my colleges, the concept of inquiry seemed to be linked to certain verbs like reviewing, finding out, discovering, looking at, engaging with or understanding. All of these suggest an exploratory and sensitive venture, with no clear end-points except a heightened awareness of current developments.

Within this paradigm, the purpose of the assessments is a deeper understanding of individual learners as learners. Assessment is viewed as part of the learning process, not as separate from it. It is not the techniques of assessing that are different from in the measurement paradigm, but the beliefs about how the required knowledge comes about.