Evaluating assessment performance

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Evaluating assessment performance is a lecture about the factors that constitute the performance, the goodness, of assessments and they can be evaluated within a single general framework. This page was converted into a lecture as there are other descriptive pages already existing about the same topic. The old content was archived and can be found here.

Scope

Purpose: To describe what assessments are about overall, what are the factors that constitute the overall performance of assessment, how they are interrelated, and how they can be evaluated.

Intended audience: Researchers (especially at doctoral student level) in any field of science (mainly natural, not social scientists).

Duration: 1 hour 15 minutes

Definition

In order to understand this lecture it is recommended to first acquaint oneself with the following lectures:

Result

  • Assessments must meet the needs of their use
  • Assessments must strive for truth
  • Both requirements must be met, which is not easy, but possible
  • Assessment is a business of creating understanding about reality
    • making right questions, providing good answers, getting the (questions and) answers where they are needed
  • Introduction through analogy: what makes a mobile phone good?
    • chain from production to use
    • goodness from whose perspective, producer or user? Can they be fit into one framework?
    • phone functionalities (qofC)
    • user interface, appearance design, use context, packaging, logistics, marketing, sales (applicability)
    • mass production/customization: components, code, assembly (efficiency)
  • Contemporary conventions:
    • quality assurance/control: process approach
    • uncertainty assessment: product approach
  • Performance related concepts in the context of assessments as science-based decision support: properties of good assessment
  • Assessments serve 2 masters: truth (science) and practical need (societal decision making, policy)
  • Evaluation: points of reference and criteria,
  • Properties of good assessments as a means of managing design and execution or evaluating past work
  • properties of good assessments is not an orthogonal set
    • applicability depends on quality of content, efficiency depends on quality of content and applicability