Optimising New Modes of Assessment In Search of Qualities and Standards [Hardcover]

This is an essential book for all those concerned with the field of assessment. It addresses relevant and timely conceptual and practical issues from a research perspective and, based on research results, clearly provides solutions to practical applications at the cutting edge of the emerging area of new modes of assessment. In a clear and rigorous manner, the authors explore new methods and study the various quality aspects of innovative approaches.

French novelist Marcel Proust instructs us that, a voyage of discovery consists, not of seeking new landscapes, but of seeing through new eyes. Nowhere in the practice of education do we need to see through new eyes than in the domain of assessment. We have been trapped by our collective experiences to see a limited array of things to be assessed, a very few ways of assessing them, limited strategies for communicating results and inflexible roles of players in the assessment drama. This edited book of readings jolts us out of traditional habits of mind about assessment. An international team of innovative thinkers relies on the best current research on learning and cognition, to describe how to use assessment to promote, not merely check for, student learning. In effect, they explore a new vision of assessment for the new millennium. The authors address the rapidly expanding array of achievement targets students must hit, the increasingly productive variety of assessment methods available to educators, innovative ways of collecting and communicating evidence of learning, and a fundamental redefinition of both students and teachers roles in the assessment process.Contributors. Acknowledgements. Preface.The Era of Assessment Engineering: Changing Perspectives on Teaching and Learning and the Role of New Modes of Assessment; M. Segers, F. Dochy, E. Cascallar.New Insights into Learning and Teaching and their Implications for Assessment; M. Birenbaum.Evaluating the Consequential Validity of New Modes olS-