A Summary of Assesment, Evaluation, Testing and Grading pp. 1-10. Scanlan, (2012).

What is Assessment?

Many educators have a very limited conception of assessment that only includes the concepts of testing and grading. They ignore that assessing goes beyond assigning students a grade and that it is crucial in the teaching/learning process.

Assessment implies making a judgment or measurement of worth of something. In the academic context it is known as educational assessment and it involves gathering and evaluating data on the different learning activities or programs.

Learner assessment is one particular type of educational assessment. It is normally conducted by teachers and it is designed for motivating and directing learning and providing feedback on the educational process or product. Feedback is provided to the key participants of the educational process:  students (feedback on learning), teachers (feedback on instruction), curriculum designers (feedback on curriculum), and administrators (on use of resources).   

Why Assessment is Important

The importance of assessment relies on the potential that it has for directing students learning as well as teachers decision-making. Students learning can be directed in the sense that educators can use students’ interest in passing tests as a way to manipulate the kind of learning that takes place. Thus, teachers can implement assessment strategies that demand students to use higher cognitive skills such as critical thinking or creative problem-solving.

By doing effective learning assessment teachers help their students become better self-directed learners and also improve the quality of the different processes at the lesson, course, and/or curriculum level.

Types and Approaches to Assessment

Assessment versus Evaluation and Grading

There is no consensus among educators that assessment and evaluation should be treated as synonyms or as two different concepts. However, if they differ in some way, it probably involves what is being measured and why and how the measurements are made. It is said that we assess students and we evaluate instruction.

With regard to the relationship between assessment and grading, the latter is considered to be a component of the former. Nonetheless, most proponents of assessment argue that grading and assessment are two different things. For them assessment measures student growth and progress on  an individual basis, emphasizing informal, formative, process-oriented reflective feedback and communication between student and teacher, while grading judges the overall quality of worth of a student’s performance in a particular educational activity in a formal, summative and final product-oriented feedback.