What Teachers Need to Know about Assessment?

A teacher must make many decisions and making a good decision in the classroom requires more than good judgment or years of experience. Good decisions as what to teach and how to teach to evaluate students' achievements are actually based on high quality information about the student, and this come from high quality assessments.

The teacher shouldn't only think that the assessments involve simply testing and grading, or think of it as separate from teaching. But rather assessment is used to collect and use information to make decisions in order to optimize teaching and students' learning.

Validity of the assessment result is very important, so that when the results are valid we can use them as trust, it's the soundness of your interpretation and the usage of the results. One thing to improve the validity is to look at the content representative and relevance where one should make sure if the assessment emphasizes what he/she taught, if it represents the schools' stated curricular content, the current thinking about the subject, and if the content contained are worth learning. Another thing to improve validity is to look on the thinking process and skills represented.