Assessment

Key Terms

High stakes assessment-High stakes assessments determine the outcome of an important event such as passing a grade/course, graduating from high school, or changing the funding for a school.

Disaggregation- All test scores are not just judged by the full school but also by small subgroups of students, such as minority, disabled, or ELL students.

Summative vs. Formative Assessments-With summative assessments, students are evaluated upon completion of the work and the focus is on the final product.  With formative assessments, students are evaluated during the work process and the focus is on improving the process.  For example, a summative assessment would be a state achievement test and a formative assessment would be a teacher response to journal entries.

Holistic Evaluation-Holistic evaluations are assessments that focus on overall quality of the work and not just the correctness of a single answer.  Holistic tests are generally considered more comprehensive than multiple choice tests and better measure deep understanding.  In assessments of writing, holistic evaluation is a "general impression" of the entire piece.

Performance Assessment-A performance assessment required students to perform a task instead of simply answering a question with given set of answers.  The task may be writing an essay or solving an open-ended math problem.

Criterion Referenced Tests-Assessments that have one, fixed performance standard for all students and student groups.

Norm Referenced Tests-Assessments that measure each child's performance against the performance of other test takers so that the standard is the median performance of all test takers.  Thus, half the population is expected to perform below average while the other half is expected to perform above average.