Purpose of Assessment - Assessment for Learning

The need of assessment is to gather relevant information about student performance or progress, or to determine student’s interest to make judgments about their learning progress.

Purpose of assessment

Some important purposes of assessment are as follows

Assessment drives instruction

• A pre-test and assessment during instruction informs instructors what students know and do not know and use the prior knowledge as a stepping place to develop new knowledge in students through his teaching. 

• By testing students learning now and then throughout instruction, the teacher could constantly revise and refine his teaching to meet the diverse needs of students.

Assessment drives learning

• Students learning mainly depend on, knowing how their learning achievement will be assessed.

• Assessment practices must send the right signals to students about what to study, how to study, and the relative time to spend on concepts and skills in a course.

• Through assessments, students understand what they need to know and what they are able to do so that, they prepare themselves accordingly.

Assessment Inform students of their progress

• Effective assessment provides students with a sense of what they know and don’t know about a subject.

• Assessment helps students to know about their present level of progress in learning and how far their efforts have been fruitful.

• It helps to find how their progress was in relation to the learning outcome of the course.

• Through feedback from instructors, students become aware of their strength and challenges with respect to course learning outcomes.

• Remedial measures can be taken based on the feedback obtained from assessment.

Assessment helps teachers to know the effectiveness of their instructional method.

• Reflection on student accomplishment offers teachers insights on the effectiveness of their teaching strategies.

• Based on this, they can adopt necessary modification in their teaching like where to strengthen the teaching and what areas are well understood or how to improve the instructions.

Assessment grade students on the basis of their level of learning achievement.

• Assessments grade students according to their proficiency attained in learning.

• Assessment helps to find whether the level of students learning achievement is on par with the level of accepted standard or not and decide their promotion accordingly.

Helps the teacher to make remedial measures when student learning is not up to the expected level

• From the feedback data obtained through assessments the teacher could understand in which areas or portions of the content on student performance is not satisfactory and accordingly reteach the same and arrange remedial teaching for those backward in learning on the basis of the findings of diagnostic test

Few Assessments and their purposes as example:

• High-stakes assessments are typically standardized tests used for the purposes of accountability—i.e.,like job interviews, driving license tests, entrance exams....

• Pre-assessments are administered before students begin a lesson, unit, course, or academic program.

      They are generally used to

• Establish a baseline against which educators measure learning progress over the duration of a program, course, or instructional period.

• Determine general academic readiness for a course, program, grade level, or new academic program that student may be transferring into. 

• Formative assessments are in-process evaluations of student learning that are typically administered multiple times during a unit, course, or academic program.

• The general purpose of formative assessment is to give educators in-process feedback about what students are learning or not learning so that instructional approaches, teaching materials, and academic support can be modified accordingly. 

• Summative assessments are used to evaluate student learning at the conclusion of a specific instructional period—typically at the end of a unit, course, semester, program, or school year.

• Summative assessments are typically scored and graded tests, assignments, or projects that are used to determine whether students have learned what they were expected to learn during the defined instructional period.