INTRODUCTION
Ensuring Fairness in Assessment
Assessment is the systematic basis for making inferences about the learning and development of students. It is the process of defining, selecting, designing, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and using information to increase students' learning and development.
● Fairness in assessment refers to the consideration of learner's needs
and characteristics, and any reasonable adjustment that need to be
applied to take account of them.
Fairness in assessment means all assessment approaches including
standardized test, performance assessment, portfolio assessment and
informal measures are free from bias and that methods of students
assessments are equitable and sensitive to diverse students population.
Concept of fairness
● A fair assessment is one in which students are given equitable opportunities to
demonstrate what they know. It means students assessed using methods and
procedures most appropriate to them.
● The concept of fairness can be used in many ways:
a. Absence of bias: Use of a test will fair if the prediction
of non test performance are comparable for different
groups.
b. Procedural fairness: In the assessment process
individuals from different groups will be treated equally.
c. Opportunity to learn: Students should be provided with an adequate or equal opportunity to learn the materials
d. Equality of results: The average performance of different groups should be same. then, a test would be considered fair.
Here,an absence of bias and procedural fairness are essential for an assessment to
have high level of validity in measuring the knowledge, and understanding that it is
intended to measure.
Forms of unfairness
● When individual differences are ignored unfairness operates.
● They are influenced by a previous work when assessing the next assignment.
● Halo effect - Teacher forms an overall impression of a student or their work -
whether positive or negative and then makes assessment decisions that are
influenced by this view of them.
What can do to ensure fairness in Assessments?
No one wants to use an assessment tool with obvious stereotyping or offensive material, of course. But it's easy to assess in ways that inadvertently favor some students over others. Effective assessment processes yield evidence and conclusions that are meaningful, appropriate, and fair to all relevant subgroups of students.Following are the ways to ensure fairness in assessment,
1. Don't rush.
Assessments that are thrown together at the last minute invariably include flaws that greatly affect the fairness, accuracy, and usefulness of the resulting evidence.
2. Plan your assessments carefully.
Aim not only to access your key learning goals but to do so in a balanced, representative way. If your key learning goals are that students should understand what happened during a certain historical period and evaluate the decisions made by key figures during that period, for example, your test should balance questions on basic conceptual understanding with questions assessing evaluation skills.
3. Aim for assignments and questions that are crystal clear.
If students find the question difficult to understand, they may answer what they think is the spirit of the question rather than the question itself, which may not match your intent.
4. Guard against unintended bias.
A fair and unbiased assessment uses contexts that are equally familiar to all and uses words that have common meanings to all. A test question on quantitative skills that asks students to analyze football statistics might not be fair to women, and using scenarios involving farming may be biased against students from urban areas, unless you are specifically assessing student learning in these contexts.
5. Ask a variety of people with diverse perspectives to review assessment tools.
This helps ensure that the tools are clear, that they appear to assess what you want them to, and that they don't favor students of a particular background.
6. Try out large-scale assessment tools.
If you are planning a large-scale assessment with potentially significant consequences, try out your assessment tool with a small group of students before launching the large-scale implementation. Consider asking some students to think out loud as they answer a test question; their thought processes should match up with the ones you intended. Read students' responses to assignments and open-ended survey questions to make sure their answers make sense, and ask students if anything is unclear or confusing.
7. Teachers need to ensure that assessments match the purpose of learning and are valid and reliable.
8. School needs to provide professional learning to ensure consistency of teacher judgement in marking student assessments so that teachers have high expectations of all students regardless of their ethnic background.
9. Schools should provide training for staff around the quality teaching model and learning programs to engage all students.
10. School should provide training for staff around the quality teaching model and apply higher order thinking models to assessments and teaching and learning programs to engage all students.
11. Teachers should focus on assessment for learning by reducing the number of formal tasks and enhance informal assessment as part of the learning process so that students can construct their knowledge and build upon their skills gradually.
12. Teachers should provide quality feedback and maintain high expectations of all of their students.
Fair assessment should possess the following principles:
1. Improves learning
The purpose of assessment is to ultimately improve student learning. Formative and summative assessments helps to accomplish this goal. It sure the student their gaps in knowledge and serve as a tool to enable and motivate students to apply and demonstrate their knowledge. It helps to inform what has been learn and accomplished.
2.Validity And Reliability
The assessment should be well it and reliable. It should be consistent and accurate indicators of student performance. To help with reliability ,assessments should be administered under suitable conditions.
3.Matches the learning outcomes and content
The assessment should be measure whether the learners have met one or more of the internet learning outcome of the lesson .Assessing students on content that has not been covered in the course content should be avoided.
4.Endeavours to be free from bias
Efforts should be made to ensure that the assessment methods do not disadvantage students based on factor search as such as there culture, gender, language etc. Assessments do not discriminate or favour any group of learners.Teachers should consider the significant differences in student learning style and not treat them as a homogeneous group.Different opportunities should be provided to demonstrate their learning.
5.Has transparency
Students should understand the purpose of the assessment and how the assessment will be used.Clear and complete directions regarding the actual assessment ensures transparency.Also a clear written policy in the course syllabus must be included.
Steps to fair assessment
1.Have clearly stated learning outcomes and share them with your students so they know what you expect from them.
2.Match your assessment to what you teach and vice versa.
3.Use many different measures and many different kinds of measure.
4.Help students learn how to do assessment task.
5.Engage and encourage your students.
6.Interpret assessment results appropriately.
7.Evaluate the outcomes of your assessment.
ASSESSMENT FOR ENHANCING CONFIDENCE IN LEARNING
Confidence is a state of mind.It is a measure of one's belief in one's own abilities.Confidence based assessment and learning is a unique methodology in which the learning truly with the assessment process.It provides numerous benefits to educational institutions.
Relationship of Assessment with Confidence,Self -esteem ,and Motivation.
1.Assessment and confidence
● Good assessment gives effective feedback to the learners and
thereby enhance their level of confidence.
● Confidence come from feelings of well being, acceptance of
your.
body and mind and belief in your own ability, skills and experience.
● Confidence and knowledge are related terms.Both of them are critical
determinants in evaluating future performance.
2.Assessment and self - esteem
● Assessment will provide knowledge about the progress of the
learners. The knowledge about the progress will enhance the
self - esteem of the learners.
● Self - esteem reflects a person's overall subjective
emotional evaluation of his own worth.
● It is a judgement of oneself as well as an attitude towards
the self.
● Self - esteem will motivate students to achieve high scores
in assessment.
3.Assessment and motivation
● Assessment play a role in student motivation.
● Assessment that encourages learning, promotes motivation by
emphasising progress and achievement.
● Assessment capable students feel greater ownership of their
learning and are more likely to attribute outcomes to factors within
their control. This encourages and motivates students.
IPSATIVE ASSESSMENT
★ Students make their own way ,set their own standards and meet their own goals .
★ This is an assessment which compares the current performance of students with their own previous performance.
★ Ipsative assessment tends to correlate with effort ,to promote effort based
attributions of success and to enhance motivation to learn.
★ An ipsative assessment in an education or learning context compares a test
taker’s results against his or her previous results .
★ It is a descriptor used in psychology to indicate a specific type of measure in
which respondents compare two or more desirable options and pick the one
that is most preferred.
Merits
● It measures progress and development .
● It encourages students to break their previous score.
● It helps to know the improvement
Whether the learner is taking advantage of feedback from previous
assessments.
● Improves self esteem and confidence .
● It helps learners assess by self and become more self reliant .
Teacher will get an idea about students ,
■ Who are not progressing and who are not suitable for the course.
■ Enables teachers to learn from assessment and this can be used to
modify their teaching.
Limitations
● The biggest problem is that assessors need to have access to records of a learner’s
past assessments to make comparisons and these are not always available, although
electronic records can help.
● It also means that assessments of different modules in a modular scheme may
need to be linked and this may be difficult if the modules have very different
learning outcomes.
● Finally, ipsative assessment requires a different way of thinking about assessment
and this may take time for teachers and students to get used to.
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