Bridging the educational research‐teaching practice gap

Abstract

Student assessment is central to the educational process and can be used for multiple purposes including, to promote student learning, to grade student performance and to evaluate the educational quality of qualifications. It is, therefore, of utmost importance that assessment instruments are of a high quality. In this article, we present various tools that instructors could use, both to improve instrument design and validity before presentation to students and, to evaluate the reliability and quality of the assessment after students have answered the questions. In keeping with our goals of the Bridging-the-Gap series, we also present various ideas from the educational literature regarding the evaluation of assessment quality and end with a list of criteria that instructors could use to guide their evaluation process.Keywords: Assessment, quality, design, item analysis, validity, reliability.There is a world-wide move in educational institutions towards the establishment of more formal structures for the evaluation of the quality of education [1]. This change has been motivated by the demands of various stakeholders in the educational process including, funding and accreditation bodies, potential employers of graduates, and the students themselves demanding qualifications that are recognized for their high educational standards, and which will thereby enable them to succeed in an ever-increasing competitive world. One way to achieve this goal is to evaluate the quality of the assessment instruments employed to assess the achievement of such outcomes. Evaluation of assessment quality also offers universities a more accurate means of evaluating faculty teaching and course quality [2] than student evaluation questionnaires which, despite often yielding unreliable measures of teaching quality [3], are the dominant instrument used to judge teacher success and promotions.In this article in the ''Bridging-the-Gap'' series on assessment, we focus on procedures that can be employed to improve the quality of student assessment.The first part of the paper deals with steps that can be taken in the design of valid test instruments, while the second part deals with the calculation of reliability and the performance of an item analysis that can be done after the students have written the test. These procedures provide evidence for retaining good items, discarding bad ones, and generally feed back into the improvement of assessment design when the instrument is used the next time around.

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