Educational assessment or educational evaluation[1] is the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data on the knowledge, skill, attitudes, aptitude and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning.[2] Assessment data can be obtained from directly examining student work to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or can be based on data from which one can make inferences about learning.[3] Assessment is often used interchangeably with test, but not limited to tests.[4] Assessment can focus on the individual learner, the learning community (class, workshop, or other organized group of learners), a course, an academic program, the institution, or the educational system as a whole (also known as granularity). The word "assessment" came into use in an educational context after the Second World War.[5]
As a continuous process, assessment establishes measurable and clear student learning outcomes for learning, providing a sufficient amount of learning opportunities to achieve these outcomes, implementing a systematic way of gathering, analyzing and interpreting evidence to determine how well student learning matches expectations, and using the collected information to inform improvement in student learning.[6] Assessment is an important aspect of educational process which determines the level of accomplishments of students.[7]
The final purpose of assessment practices in education depends on the theoretical framework of the practitioners and researchers, their assumptions and beliefs about the nature of human mind, the origin of knowledge, and the process of learning.
^Some educators and education theorists use the terms assessment and evaluation to refer to the different concepts of testing during a learning process to improve it (for which the equally unambiguous terms formative assessment or formative evaluation are preferable) and of testing after completion of a learning process (for which the equally unambiguous terms summative assessment or summative evaluation are preferable), but they are in fact synonyms and do not intrinsically mean different things. Most dictionaries not only say that these terms are synonyms but also use them to define each other. If the terms are used for different concepts, careful editing requires both the explanation that they are normally synonyms and the clarification that they are used to refer to different concepts in the current text.
^Allen, M.J. (2004). Assessing Academic Programs in Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
^Kuh, G.D.; Jankowski, N.; Ikenberry, S.O. (2014). Knowing What Students Know and Can Do: The Current State of Learning Outcomes Assessment in U.S. Colleges and Universities(PDF). Urbana: University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.
^National council on Measurement in Education http://www.ncme.org/ncme/NCME/Resource_Center/Glossary/NCME/Resource_Center/Glossary1.aspx?hkey=4bb87415-44dc-4088-9ed9-e8515326a061#anchorA Archived 2017-07-22 at the Wayback Machine
^Nelson, Robert; Dawson, Phillip (2014). "A contribution to the history of assessment: how a conversation simulator redeems Socratic method". Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 39 (2): 195–204. doi:10.1080/02602938.2013.798394. S2CID 56445840.
^Suskie, Linda (2004). Assessing Student Learning. Bolton, MA: Anker.
^Oxford Brookes University. "Purposes and principles of assessment". www.brookes.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2018-10-09. Retrieved 2018-10-09.
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