Rationale Behind Learning Outcomes and Assessment

In creating learning outcomes and test items, it is imperative that the test items are valid measurements of the learning outcomes. This may seem like common sense, but invalid measurements occur more often than one might think, and it can be easy to mistakenly create tests that do not truly measure what they are intended to do. For instance, as I stated in the previous post, my learning outcomes are not intended to measure a student’s reading ability. Although reading ability is highly important, my purposes of the learning outcomes learn toward comprehension of literature. I’m not looking for reading ability; I am looking for understanding of literature components, such as the parts of a book, the main idea, and character differentiation.  At this stage, I want to make sure my students are developing an understanding of these components and what is read, otherwise words are simply words with no real meaning. Because this is my intent, all written tests devised under these learning outcomes shall be read to the students. If students are left to read the tests independently, there is a chance of inaccuracy of test results because students that have mastered the content but not yet mastered the skill of reading would be clearly at a disadvantage. This would reflect negatively on test scores and would inaccurately portray that they have failed to master the content.

With that in consideration, let’s examine the different test items. For learning outcomes one and two, my test items were based on multiple choice and short answer responses. The multiple choice questions have been examined for grammatical cues and unintentional trickery. My goal is to measure student’s ability to identify the parts of the book, not to try to trick them. The pictures provided are intended to provide realistic application. Although this is not a performance assessment, I want to give students the most realistic examples in this written assessment. If possible, all children would be provided a copy of the book and answer the questions by examination of the book, but in reality picture cues are easier to implement. The disadvantage to such format is that children are limited to select pages that are pictured, so the answer choices are limited, but it does allow for measurement of identification of the parts of a book. Short answer responses are also added to gain more insight of learning outcomes. With multiple choice questions there is always a possibility that students will simply guess at the answer. In order to provide a more accurate view of student understanding, short answer questions are added so that students must provide an answer. The questions do not require higher-level thinking in these assessments because the intent is to measure at the knowledge level in identifying the components.

Creating an essay item presented more of a challenge for me. Although there are great benefits in essay items, devising an item for second grade students seemed a little difficult. Typically at this stage, students are beginning to understand the purposes of writing and essay formats are not generally used. It’s not that it is not possible for second grade student to write an essay; it’s simply that they are still in the learning how to write stage. For this reason, it is important to acknowledge that there will be spelling and grammatical errors. Most children in this grade level understand that there must be capital letters at the beginning of a sentence and punctuation at the end, but they are still learning how to spell, how to construct sentences with a subject and predicate, how to capitalize proper nouns, and so forth. Obviously they will not be free from errors. For this reason, although instilling grammatical rules and proper spelling are important, the use of the essay in this assessment is to measure the ability to understand character traits and comparison among characters. In such an assessment, points shall not be lost due to such errors and should focus on the content of the essay rather than the structure. If the essay was intended to measure grammatical skills in writing, then by all means errors should be included in scoring, but for the intent of this essay, it would not be valid to do so.

For the essay item of choosing two characters to compare similarities and differences, higher-level thinking skills are used to analyze and compare and contrast the characters. They essay will reflect student’s understanding of character traits and how characters are alike and different, thus reinforcing comprehension skills. The choice of text does not involve a wide array of characters, so students will not have to divulge too much time in choosing which characters to use. Rather than pick the characters for the students, I prefer to allow students to make the choice. The scoring will not be based on which character they choose; rather scoring will be based on the ability to describe the similarities and differences among the two characters they chose. Scoring would be rubric-based with a rating scale based on at the essay consisting of at least three characteristics described for similarities, at least three characteristics described for differences, the descriptions accurately portraying the character of their choosing, and the analysis of the characters.

The testing measurements I chose are intended to measure the learning outcomes. I chose these methods because I feel that they have more advantages in assessing what I want to measure. Although I considered using matching in identifying book parts, I felt that at this stage there would be too many options and I did not want to overwhelm students with too many choices. Multiple choice assessments provide a smaller sample of choices that allow for measurement of knowledge. On a similar note, I chose to avoid true/false questions because I want to ensure that students are identifying the correct book parts. True/false questions are more susceptible to guessing and I did not feel would be advantageous in deciphering if students have mastered identification of the content.

As for the essay response, because I intend to measure the higher level thinking skill of analyzing the characters, this method seemed to be the best measurement tool. Kubiszyn and Borich (2010) point out that although essays are time consuming and can be difficult to score, the essay is highly beneficial for measuring high-level cognitive skills. In using the essay, the answers are not there for students to quickly identify or pick from a set; students must demonstrate their own knowledge of the topic. For this reason, I felt it would be difficult to utilize most other forms of written assessment to measure analysis of characters.

References:

Kubiszyn, T., Borich, G. (2010). Educational testing & measurement (9^th ed). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.