Creating Effective Assessments

While reading Chapter 24 in HDB I was reminded of both some of tests that I have taken through my life and of some tests that I have seen others take or that I have administered. Throughout all of those tests it seemed that Face Validity was one of the most important aspects because it either made the students confident in the assessment or it made them laugh it off, even if it was an effective assessment. A good example of an assessment that had no face validity was one that my instructor in my obeservation class had administered. One of the questions that was on this test (a test of multiple writing skills) was something like, "List 3 reasons why an Elephant does not make for a good pet". Most of the test was short answer like this and since the students were not told explicitly what this was assessing they didn't take it seriously or understand it. Now to give this particular question some credit, the instructor had used this example to teach a lesson one day and the analogy made sense at the time. Although by the time the midterm test came almost everyone had forgotten about how he had used this analogy for 10 min. of a 2 hour lesson over a moth ago. The problem here was simply a lack of purpose/clarity, face validity, authentic tasks, and possibly some perceived Washback. Interestingly enough, many of these simple problems (3/4) were addressed in HDB Ch. 24 under how to turn" existing tests into more effective procedures". Now my observation class' instructor might have to restructure much of his test tasks in order to fulfill these seemingly simple issues, but in the end his test would be much more effective and useful for semesters to come.

To address Washback quickly (which reminds me of the negative term "back-wash", i.e. when someone's saliva goes into their drink, but since this is the opposite of our term we can consider Washback as possitive) I just want to mention the grading of our Video Analysis Assigment. I think that the feedback we got (or at least that I did) was very helpful for our Washback, since I will be able to use those comments the next time I teach. If the only thing we had gotten back was the rubric with the different grades then I would've only been able to speculate about how I did; usually my mind goes to the negative when being graded. Since the comments that I got were relevent and helped me to think of things that I hadn't thought of before, I felt that our assessment was much more useful and practical.