LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
• describe the steps involved in writing and returning an assessment task
• describe how Bloom's taxonomy may be used to develop assessment items of differing complexity levels
• write assessment items at several complexity levels for a given science concept
• describe the structure of an open-ended inquiry assessment task
• describe the process of writing an assessment rubric.
Introduction
This chapter is the ‘mirror’ to Chapter 1.6, which considered assessment at a relatively high level, and described a number of commonly used approaches to describing assessment, including assessment as/of/for learning and formative and summative assessment. In this chapter we will apply the principles described in Chapter 1.6 to develop a number of illustrative high-quality assessment tasks. Because of the space limitation and the variety of possible assessment task types that may be developed, we will focus on the thinking that underpins the development of assessment. Initially we will consider the development of individual assessment items and then look at writing an open-ended inquiry task. This chapter should provide you with a structured approach to developing any genre of assessment.
OPENING VIGNETTE
Watch the video Performance-based assessment: Engaging students in chemistry (www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvYSVEmcjHM). This video presents an important consideration when developing summative assessment, namely, the capacity for an assessment task to provide all students with the opportunity to demonstrate the full range of capabilities. This includes students who will struggle to meet the minimum requirements of the task as well as those who will achieve very highly.
Questions
1. What does the term assessment mean to you and what do you feel are the main purposes for undertaking assessment in science?
2. Think of an example of how an assessment task has helped your students. What were the specific characteristics of that task that made it effective?
3. What approaches have been used by the chemistry teacher to enhance the requirement for higher order thinking/processing in the assessment task?
4. Considering the approach taken in designing the assessment task, how long do you think it would take for the task to be completed? What problems do you consider might arise due to time considerations?
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