Does your assessment question test whether the student ‘knows’ something? Or does it test whether he/she ‘understands’ a concept? Or whether he/she is able to ‘apply’ that understanding? And more importantly, is this aligned with what you wanted to test in the first place? You learnt about Bloom’s taxonomy in Course 4 on Content Development and Planning. The same framework applies to assessments too! Let us see how in this topic.
Now that we have revised the basics of formative assessments, let’s discuss how the assessment can be tailored towards the achievement of the learning objective. It is essential that the assessment matches what the student must be able to do after the class.
It is important to know that an Assessment is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on how easy or difficult it is, but only based on alignment with the Learning Objective.
Look at the image below to understand an example of aligning “Assessment” to “Goal” based on the Learning Objective.
If you noticed, in both of the above examples, the assessment is misaligned not because the topic is incorrect, but because the skill is not aligned. Let us dig deeper into this in the next topic.
