Designing better assessments by Dr Clare Pemberton, Biology Department The ideal assessment would be one that is quick to produce, reusable and provides useful information. This sounds simple enough but is this always something that our assessments deliver? I am using the term assessment with reference to everything from full exams that assess overall performance to low stakes class questions that assess basic understanding. I should emphasise that I know it isn’t feasible to spend hours on every set of questions. And, in fact, we may also do a lot of this instinctively. But being more aware of the design of our assessments can allow us to get the most from them. Taking care with assessment design, and making use of past paper questions – which, after all, most closely replicate what pupils will face in their final exams – need not be mutually exclusive. Three questions capture the key areas to consider when designing assessment and are summarised in the table below. Key question What might be considered here? Why consider this? What specific knowledge or skills are we assessing? - Splitting past paper questions into separate and specific tasks. - Focus on key ideas or skills to assess, rather than a question that is simply relevant to the topic. The assessment needs to be fit for purpose. If you are assessing a skill or topic, then you need to ensure that it is immediately accessible for pupils. What do we want to do with the information that this assessment gives us? - Are pupils applying their knowledge to new situations or simply recalling a topic? - Is the assessment being used as a performance indicator? If so, does the output need to be used to compare against their previous work, peers, or external benchmarks? - How will it be fed back to pupils? - You may want to use the assessment to highlight how the theory could be used in an exam setting, to practise exam technique or to check for understanding. - The assessment could then highlight whether you need to re-teach the topic or skill. - An overall percentage can be useful as a performance indicator, but individual section scores would better highlight the areas to improve. What is the most appropriate way to assess this? - The options here are endless, including multiple choice, problem-solving tasks, essays, oral questions or project tasks. A varied diet is probably best for both teachers and pupils. - A carefully chosen assessment format can help reduce construct irrelevance, the possibility that other factors can influence the outcome of an assessment. - The past paper question format feels safe and reliable - especially when exams loom large and preparation time is limited. - Ideally, we would want to produce questions that could be reused, reviewed, and developed over time. This will also provide data that might be useful for comparison in future years. The best way to examine these ideas is to look at some example questions. The examples used here are not exhaustive, but hopefully illustrate some of the points mentioned above in more depth. Place a tick (✓) in the box next to the sequence that shows the correct order of magnitude of these measurements. Example 1 50 nm < 0.5 μm < 5 x 10-2 mm < 0.5 x 10-5 m £ 50 nm < 0.5 μm < 0.5 x 10-5 m < 5 x 10-2 mm £ 0.5 μm < 50 nm < 0.5 x 10-5 m < 5 x 10-2 mm £ 0.5 μm < 50 nm < 5 x 10-2 mm < 0.5 x 10-5 m £ This question, taken from an A level Biology paper, is assessing multiple skills and won’t be helpful if it’s being used as a diagnostic tool in class. There are several skills assessed here: an understanding of the language of the question, such as order of magnitude; an understanding of what the symbol < means; knowledge of standard form and the ability to convert between different units of length. If a pupil were to score poorly on this question, could I easily identify which skill needs more practice? For an assessment in a lesson, I might want to do a section on symbols and what they mean; one on converting into and out of standard form and one on converting between units. For a quick snapshot of areas in need of development, multiple-choice questions might be the best format here, with options based on the most common mistakes that pupils make. Thringboard Issue 2 – May 2022 9