Educational Assessment Methods Educational Assessment Methods

The trend during the 1990s has been away from standardized multiplechoice testing and toward performance assessment, which includes performance, portfolios, and products assessments. According to Madaus and O'Dwyer (1999), this represents a break from the past, but not necessarily one that has yet been fully realized. According to them, the general trend in educational assessment has been toward increasing efficiency in the system and making the system standardized, easily administered, objective, reliable, comparable, and inexpensive. The past decade has seen a change toward more qualitative, less standardized, less objective, and less comparable measures. Both shape the school and influence teachers, administrators, and students, in different ways. Problems result when the different types of assessments are used inappropriately.

For example, the focus on constructionism in teaching and learning, along with collaborative teaching and learning, is more congruent with qualitative, rather than qua

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ces of testing instruments. This latter is an important point. If performance assessments, or qualitative measures are used for helping teachers, principals, and local schools to improve their programs, this is an effective use. However, if these new methods are used as part of largescale testing efforts as policy and education reform tools, they are likely to be ineffective and detrimental (Madaus and O'Dwyer, 1999). Instead, quantitative measures are more likely to provide objective, and statistically significant, evaluations of programs. Appropriate Use of Assessment Techniques Although standardized tests are often used inappropriately to put pressure on schools and school districts, there are appropriate uses for them. They can be useful in comparing achievements within the district from yeartoyear if there is some specific focus. They can also be useful in determining the usefulness of interventions designed to improve certain skills, such as basic math skills. However, they should not be used to compare apples and oranges, comparing individuals, schools, and systems that have different situations and resources. This is not helpful. On the other hand, process evaluations can be useful for many purposes. They can
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