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Standards-based assessment: a tool and means to the development of human capital and capacity building in education.

Article Excerpt
This paper outlines a model for giving meaning to student achievement by referencing assessment to student learning or standards. This effectively shifts the focus in assessment from notions of rank ordering students (comparing their performance purely to each other) to those of monitoring growth or progress and measurement. More specifically it introduces standards-based assessment: the concept and theory. It considers how such systems operate and provides some possible strategies for implementation. Finally it shows how such systems can significantly impact upon human capital and capacity building in education.

Introduction

Assessment is an essential element in the development of human capital and capacity building in education: it involves the evaluation of performance for a purpose. Students are generally assessed for the purpose of improving their learning and monitoring and certificating their performance or achievement. In this current age, more and more students are staying on at school. Given this, it is critical that curriculum goals, subject offerings and pedagogical practices change to cater for this more heterogeneous and diverse student population and to take account of the skills and understandings needed for tomorrow's uncertain future. Reform to senior secondary certificates has been occurring and is planned in many countries around the world, including in Australia, where in 2005 the Commonwealth Minister for Education advocated a new national qualification (Nelson, 2005), and in Hong Kong (Li, 2004). In the United Kingdom the Secretary of State for Education and Skills has issued a White Paper outlining major reforms to secondary education (Kelly, 2005).

Assessment practice needs to change to cater for these same demands. In education, information is collected about student achievement in numerous ways. Since this paper is primarily concerned with the results from examinations and formal tests, the focus will be on highly structured modes of assessment like those used in external examinations. The same basic principles apply to all modes of assessment, however, including formative assessment.

In the past most education systems assessed student results in terms of marks and these marks were reported in the context of a norm-referenced model. Traditionally marks or grades were used to summarise the achievement of students on tests, examinations or in courses of study. Marks were assigned to student work on the basis of judgments about performance on tasks. Depending on the task, such judgments involved simple observations that any observer could make and/or involved more complex evaluation, which required professional experience and expert knowledge of the domain being tested.

Giving meaning to student achievement: norm referencing

While marks have been used to summarise student achievement it must be remembered that marks by themselves have no clear meaning. They need to be referenced to some external criterion to be given explicit meaning; for example, one piece of information that is required is the maximum score for the task or test. Another piece of information that is required is the mean or average mark of the group on the examination or test. This average gives an indication of the relative difficulty of the test for the group taking the test. In some situations the spread of marks on the test (standard deviation) is also provided to give an indication of how the scores of the students on the test were spread out around the average or mean.

A further piece of information that is needed is the performance of the group relative to the full cohort of students. If the comparative group is weak relative to the full cohort, then being above average for the group might still mean that the performance is not very good relative to the full cohort. Thus marks are given meaning by referencing them to the marks of a comparative or norming group. The process is referred to as norm referencing. It has served educators (and the educational community as a whole) well since the introduction of formal examination procedures.

One of the main advantages of norm referencing is that the marks, grades or awards are interpreted in the same way from situation to situation (year-to-year; subject-to-subject): for example, a distinction can be awarded each year to those students who are in the top 20% of the group taking the examination. Similarly, a mark of 50 can be set as the pass mark by assigning it to the highest mark of the bottom 30% of students. This means for example, that each year 20% of students in a subject will receive a distinction and 30% will fail.

This approach to reporting is the system that most teachers and the general community have traditionally been exposed to over the course of their educational experiences. Generally most people do not appreciate that the marks that they get have been adjusted by referencing them to the achievement of the norming group.

There are numerous limitations associated with referencing marks to the performance of the group. One obvious weakness is that the result has no reference to the standard of the performance. While the examination, or any other assessment, potentially provides a wealth of content information, the resulting report indicates the location of the student relative to the norming group and that is all. It provides little meaningful information about what students know and can do other than the implicit understanding made about the standard of the group performance remaining constant from year-to-year and from subject-to-subject.

Peddie (1992, p. 23) makes the point that it has been concerns like the one expressed above that has led to a search for more appropriate ways of reporting student achievement: 'a number of related concerns have led to many teachers and some members of the public wanting a different system. They wanted each learner to be tested simply to see what that learner knew and could do.'

Over the years there have been attempts to move the process of reporting achievement away from norm referencing and towards trying to better capture the image of what it is the students know and can do. Criterion referencing did just that; all the behaviours that students might be expected to demonstrate during a course were listed and then reported when the student successfully demonstrated the behaviour--usually after a number of occasions.

Giving meaning to student achievement: criterion referencing

The process of giving meaning to student achievement by referencing it to specified criteria is called criterion referencing (Popham, 1978). The main advantage of criterion referencing is that it actually reports what behaviours students have demonstrated and limits the need to reference the achievement to that of other students.

Criterion referencing is very labour intensive. It is also characterised by an...

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