The Formal Assessment of Student Learning: Alternative Assessment

Early in the report of the National Research Council's committee on assessment, it is written that ?>Most common kinds of educational tests do a reasonable job with certain functions of testing such as measuring knowledge of basic facts and procedures and producing overall estimates of proficiency for an area of the curriculum, ?> but the question remains as to whether they ?>capture the kinds of complex knowledge and skills that are emphasized in contemporary standards and deemed essential for success in an information based economy ?> (Pellegrino, Chudowsky, and Glaser, 2000). In recent years many engineering educators have taken a similar view, although their answers to the problem differed from those presented in the report, which is primarily concerned with school education. In America they have followed in the path of other educators in higher education, as, for example, Wiggins (1993) who advocated authentic assessment. The responses to the demand for alternative assessments have been different in other countries. Thus, in the 1960s in the United Kingdom continuous assessment was seen to be the answer to the problems inherent in the final examination. Engineering is particularly suited to authentic assessment because of its desire to simulate the real world that students will meet when they exit from their courses. Project work has been introduced, laboratory methods have changed and continue to change because of technological advances, and over the forty-year period covered by this review, much experimentation has been done with new forms of assessment. These same advances have caused changes in curriculum content. The higher level cognitive skills required in the real world are not tested or predicted by the objective tests that are common in the United States or by the problem style exams set in England and many of the universities in countries of the Commonwealth. The major ?>alternatives ?> have been in the use of journals, portfolios, peer assessment and self-assessment. The primary purpose of this Chapter is to consider these nontraditional or alternative approaches to assessment. It should not be assumed, however, that authentic means superior. 1 ; There remains a lot of work to be done to determine the validity of many of the rubrics used. Face validity is an insufficient criterion for their evaluation. Traditional approaches to examining and testing remain important. What matters is that they too should be subject to continuing development. 2 ; for this reason, this Chapter concludes with some comments on conventional examining and testing. Whatever system of assessment is used a key art is question setting. It is now understood, better than it ever has been that assessment is not an isolated activity. It exerts a powerful influence on learning and it must be aligned with the curriculum, teaching and learning. Because the curriculum has many objectives, assessment like teaching will be multiple-strategy, each method being chosen for the objective that it is most likely to achieve. For this reason, nontraditional (authentic) as well as traditional measures will be required if a person's performance is to be satisfactorily judged. There is growing experience of this pedagogy of assessment among engineering educators. Some have been prepared to take risks in the quest for greater validity with the type of tests they use. There is plenty of room for ex...