The Importance Of Assessment In Education

In education, the term assessment refers to the wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students. While assessments are often equated with traditional tests especially the standardized tests developed by testing companies and administered to large populations of students educators use a diverse array of assessment tools and methods to measure a student’s knowledge on all possible aspects. Just as academic lessons have different functions, assessments are typically designed to measure specific elements of learning like the level of knowledge a student already has about the concept or skill the teacher is planning

In addition, assessments are developed by a wide array of groups and individuals, including teachers, district administrators, universities, private companies, state departments of education, and groups that include a combination of these individuals and institutions (“Assessment”, 2015).

Assessment is about more than evaluations of learning at the end of teaching segments, such as traditional tests or papers. Research shows that assessment works best when it is ongoing in ways that help students and teachers gauge learning in progress. This ongoing, or formative, assessment provides feedback that allows students to address their shortcomings in a timely fashion. Best practice is that courses should include summative (at the ending of a learning segment) and formative (ongoing during a learning segment) assessments (“Assessment strategy”,

Each student has their own interpretation and idea on what assessment is. Brown and Hirschfield (2008) defined conception as mental representations of phenomena in reality that explains complex and difficult categories of experience, such as assessment. Assessment is defined as any act of interpreting information about student performance, collected through any of multitude of means (Brown & Hirschfield, 2008). Moreover, students’ conceptions of educational processes are important because there is evidence that those conceptions have an impact on their educational experiences and learning (Brown & Hirschfield, 2008).

Research has demonstrated that students learn best when the educational process is purposeful, integrated, and collaborative. In most cases, faculties have learning goals for the students or courses they teach. However, these may not be made explicit. The assessment process involves articulating your learning goals, so that they may be communicated to others, and evaluated for continued improvement. Having explicit goals also facilitates the integration of courses and programs, helps to identify areas of omission or redundancy, and allows you to document