Abstract
Being involved in student assessment is perhaps the most critical of all tasks facing the teacher. Generally, teachers take such involvement quite seriously but, sadly, the quality of many assessment and examination procedures leave much to be desired. The aim of this chapter, therefore, will be to help you to ensure that the assessments with which you are involved will measure what they are supposed to measure in as fair and as accurate a way as possible. We will provide some background information about the purposes of assessment and the basic principles of educational measurement. We will then detail the forms of assessment with which you should be familiar in order that you can select the best method to use.
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There are many useful general texts on educational measurement. Two which providestraightforwardaccountsof the principles and procedures of assessment I re W.A. Mehrens and I.J. Lehmann’s Measurementand Evaluation in Education and Psychology (fourth edition),Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1991 andR.L. Ebel’s Essentials of Educational Measurement (fifthedition),IPrentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1991. Both have useful discussionsof broad assessment considerations such as objectives, planning, reliability,validity and scoring, and also provide a wide range of examples of test I items.
Anotheruseful book covering the broad aspects of assessment is Classroom AssessmentTechniques. A Handbook for College Teachers by T.A. Angelo and K.P. Cross, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1993.
Wecan recommend two comprehensive sources of I information on methods of assessmentof particular interest to those involved in medical education: I
Assessing Clinical Competence by V.R. Neufeld and G.R. I Norman (eds.), Springer, New York, 1985. This is a multi- author review of methods being used in theevaluation of competence.
The Certification and Recertification of Doctors: Issues in the Assessmentof Clinical Competence Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993. Thisbook, which is edited by D.I. Newble, B.C. Jolly and R.E. Wakeford, contains aseries of reviews by an international group of authors covering all aspects ofassessment for the purposes of certification and recertification. Of particularrelevance to this chapter is an article on Methods of Assessment inCertification by C.P.M. van der Vleuten and D.I. Newble (eds.).
Otherbooks and articles referred to in this chapter
Problem Centred Learning: the Modified Essay Question in Medical EduationbyK. Hodgkin and J.D.E. Knox, Churchill-Livingstone, Edinburgh, 1975. This is thebook written by the originators of this method of assessment. It gives detailsand examples of how such questions should be constructed. An abbreviatedversion is available in the form of abooklet (No. 5) from the Association for the Study of Medical Education(ASME).
Assessment of Medical Competence Using a Structured ClinicalExamination byR.M. Harden and F.A. Gleeson. This isavailable as an ASME booklet (No. 8) and can also be found in journal form in MedicalEducation 13, 1979, 44-54. Itprovides details of how to construct such an examination and containsplenty of examples.
Extended Matching Items: A Practical Alternative to Free ResponseQuestions byS.M. Case and D.B. Swanson, Teaching andLearning in Medicine 5, 1993,107-115.
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© 1994 David Newble and Robert Cannon
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Newble, D., Cannon, R. (1994). Assessing the Students. In: A Handbook for Medical Teachers. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1426-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1426-4_7
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