Assessment Tool Considerations
Dr. Gail Joseph: We want to make sure that there's the best match between the purpose and the tool. So, there might be some assessments that programs are using that are great at helping a teacher understand a child's strengths and teaching targets. But they might be really lousy or not so good at, as a use for kind of aggregating up and understanding how children are making progress and their rate of progress.
So there might be different tools selected for different purposes and it's completely OK for programs to have more than one assessment in place. We want to think about, for the assessments, are they valid assessments for the construct that we're trying to assess? Are they reliable? And there's lots of different versions of reliability. I'm sure you all know this. So there's that kind of test-retest reliability that's very important with screening instruments, but there's also this idea of inter-rated reliability and we think of this in a couple ways too.
So one inter-rated reliability is that I come up with the same score that the test developer would come up with based on this portfolio. That's one way we look at inter-rated reliability. But another way to think about, it when you're helping a program, is to say, “Would Johnny be scored the same by Gail as Pat, right?”
So is the child's test score, assessment score a product of who is assessing and in what classroom or am I pretty aware — or am I pretty sure that a child, because our assessment is so — so thorough and provides such great guidelines, I'm pretty sure that the child would get the same score, no matter what classroom they were in, if that makes sense, or who was assessing them I should say.
So, there's kind of different ways that we look at reliability. And then social validity is really ... Does the teacher or the assessor or the parent, do they find the assessment process something that they are willing to do? And do they find that the scores that it yields, or the information that it yields, is important to them and meaningful to them?
And I think if social validity is low, then sometimes implementation is a little bit sketchier, right? So if I don't value the information I get from my assessment, do I put as much kind of emphasis and effort into conducting that assessment as I would if I found that information really valuable? So that's another little kind of check on validity that we want to do with our programs. Do teachers understand the assessment?
Do they find the information valuable to them? If it's something that they're just doing as a compliance measure, then that could perhaps be problematic. We also want to understand if parents find the information that they get from the assessment reports valuable? Or would they like something else?
Learn how to consider assessment tools. Hear from Dr. Gail Joseph, associate professor in educational psychology and director of the Cultivate Learning and EarlyEdU Alliance at the University of Washington. The video is part of the Ongoing Child Assessment to Support Learning module, one of several EarlyEdU Alliance Higher Education Learning Modules.
