Assessment: A Guide for Teachers

Teachers who develop useful assessments provide corrective instruction and give learners a second chance to learn, motivating them and increasing interaction between the teacher and the learner. Assessment is the process of collecting, synthesizing, and interpreting information to make decisions about learners and schools. The definition of assessment varies, but it is generally understood as the systematic collection, review, and use of information about educational programs to improve learning and development. Assessment is an ongoing process that covers many different types of data gathering tools for measuring a certain behavior or knowledge using a set of items. It is aimed at collecting information to make decisions about learners and schools, and it is a continuous process of determining learners' progress in acquiring desired competencies using appropriate tools and instruments. Assessment can be described as a tool or instrument for measuring a sample or certain behavior attribute of a learner, and it may constitute one or several question items. An examination, on the other hand, is a battery or series of tests put together for measuring several behavior attributes of a learner. Tests and examinations are both components of assessment, and the assessment process can commence when a test or examination is administered to learners, followed by marking and awarding measurement scores or grades to their responses. Measurements can be stated as the process of assigning numerical values, marks, scores, or grades to the responses of learners, while evaluation can be described as making value judgments on the worth or value of a given measure following a set of criteria. Assessment determines what learners will learn, the methods they will employ to retain, reproduce, reconstruct, and engage with learned material, and it involves making expectations explicit and public, setting appropriate criteria and high standards for learning quality. The purposes of assessment include determining what learners will learn, methods they will employ to retain, reproduce, reconstruct, and engage with learned material, and making expectations explicit and public. Assessment also involves systematically gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to determine how well performance matches expectations and standards, and the resulting information is used to document, explain, and improve performance. Assessment is important because it enables a teacher to identify the entry behavior of learners at the beginning of an academic calendar year, topic, concept, or skill. Teachers can use preliminary assessment to gather information on learners' background knowledge and skills for planning and designing lessons, and assessments provide data on learners' progress in learning the expected outcomes. Assessment helps in identifying learners' progress in acquiring the skills, strategies, and concepts identified in the syllabus, gathering data, and making decisions on whether learners are ready to move to the next level of teaching and learning. The principles of assessment guide a teacher on decisions to make about assessment types to get information to guide their instructional methods adjustments. The five assessment principles for use in classroom literacy assessment include establishing what learners can do, their developmental stages, and what they need to learn next, using assessment to inform instruction, gathering and having a variety of assessment measures, and using the results of the assessment to support alternative instructional processes. Assessment should be carried out at the beginning of the instructional topic and continues progressively until the topic is covered and the learner has internalized the concept or skill. It should be an integral part of the teaching and learning process, and teachers should use assessment techniques that are relevant for gathering data on the expected learning outcomes that should be examined against the objectives of the lesson. Teachers should also employ a variety of assessment techniques and not depend on one or two types only. The curriculum alignment that is made of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment cycle (CIA) is an ongoing process where each part of the process works together to inform what and how to teach. Teachers need to select and use various instructional techniques and assess whether the objectives are met by the learners. The data from assessment should be used in planning content based on the objectives and in selection of instructional techniques.