Extra Credit Article

Quality of Questions on Common Tests at Issue

What? Debates about assessments have been an ongoing process and this article focus on incorporating open-ended questions on assessment. The purpose of these open ended questions is to assess student's higher order thinking skills to see if they really understand a subject. Though this would be a great implementation in the assessments, the problems of cost and scoring arise. This would cause it so teachers could not just have computers score their tests, but rather humans would have to hand score each individual test. This would then take much more time, resulting in more hours that those individuals need to be paid for.

So What? I believe that this article is focusing on all areas of assessment which are practicality, reliability, validity, fairness. It focuses on practicality in that it is not very practical to think that they will have the hands or the resources right away to do this type of testing. Reliability is a major factor too in that we don't know how reliable the scoring will be due to the fact that different people will be scoring these tests and they may have different opinions about a topic. Validity is something that is addressed because this type of testing is very valuable in that it shows student understanding of a subject, not that they only know about it. Last is fairness which goes along with reliability. Students may receive a good or bad score depending on the person grading their test.

Now What? As a teacher, I can use this type of assessment in my own class even if the groups that write assessments do not use this type of open ended testing. I can take the time to make sure that my students are understanding a concept through this type of assessment and I believe that they will benefit greatly from it. Open ended questions may not be realistic when it comes to state or nationwide testing, but I definitely think it is do-able in the confinement of a teacher's personal classroom.