Process / Selecting Assessment
Technically, alignment of assessments and objectives, also called validity, should be done first. If you have already aligned objectives with the essential knowledge in a scope and sequence guide then you can follow the procedure for assessment alignment below. If you want more practice with creating assessment, complete this online activity.
Procedure
This procedure allows you to determine if an assessment is valid by checking to see if important content is being measured or if unimportant content is being measured.
1. Select the assessment that you want to check for alignment. This can be a quiz, test, project, paper, essay, performance profile, or any way that student learning is assessed.
2. On a quiz or test, look at each item and find the objective(s) that you think the item is measuring. Write the objective(s) alongside the item. Then, look at the objectives and find the items that you think measure the objective. If you already have an objective for an item, move to the next objective.
For a project, paper, essay or performance profile where a rubric is available, write the objectives beside the standards or places in the rubric where specific behavior is described. If you do not know how to make a rubric, you can learn more here.
3. Look at the assessment, are there any items, sections or student performance for which there are no aligned objectives? If so, are these items measuring behavior that you think should be measured because these behaviors relate to non-SOL content that you think is important? If the answer is “No” to the last question, you are probably measuring performance that should not be measured and is a source of test error.
4. Look at the aligned objectives, are there objectives that are not measured? If so, you need to construct measures of these objectives.
5. As a final check, especially if you are not sure if the assessment is aligned, go to Standards of Learning Curriculum Frameworks for English, Science, Mathematics, and History and Social Science. Compare the behavior called for in the essential knowledge, skill, and process bullets with the behaviors on the assessment instrument. If the SOL calls for high level process, does the assessment allow for that? If the behavior is a high level behavior, a recall item is not likely to be valid.
With this understanding, let's review
Mrs. Allen's assessment.