Assessment Criteria
"Develop explicit criteria and outcomes."
Having pre-determined standards of performance is the most defensible approach to assessment. Without a clear understanding of the subject goals students have a greater chance of becoming confused and wasting time trying to discover what it is we want them to learn.
As you plan your teaching you will make choices on what you think is the best way to learn a particular skill, knowledge or attribute. If you go a small step further and make these goals clear to your students, then the written objectives used in curriculum design will serve a useful purpose in assisting your students' learning. The most direct way students experience what is needed to achieve the subject's learning objectives is through the assessment criteria.
Writing Assessment Criteria
Once the goals of assessment have been determined it is necessary to descibe the criteria that will be used to judge whether the desired level of performance has been achieved. Learining objectives consist of three parts:
- the student action;
- the content; and,
- the standard required to meet the objective.
Assessment criteria relates to the third part of the objective, the standard of performance.
Criteria are developed by analyzing the learning outcomes and identifying the specific characteristics that contribute to the overall assignment. These are the standards by which learning is judged.
Capturing the multiple dimensions of student performance is at the heart of criterion development. A range of diverse performance measures can be formulated for any given performance. The main question is, how many criterion are needed that contain neither irrelevant or miss important areas? The criteria then need to be linked with marks in some form of combined composite score.