Assessment is concerned with gathering such data that plays an important role in students’ learning and motivation. A well-designed assessment consists of various Academic assessment tools that help determine how students will approach the learning task and what study behaviors they will use.
The main purpose behind undertaking the assessment is to gather information about the performance or progress of the students or to know the students’ interests to make judgments about their learning process.
Why are Assessments Important?
Assessment is important for every kind of organization. However, the following points highlight the importance of assessment in educational institutes –
- For student’s progress – With assessments, it can be known whether or not the students can talk about the new knowledge or not. The skills that the students have learned can they use in real life?
- For teacher self-evaluation – Teachers need to know what is working for the students and what more they can do to help them in the learning process. For this, it is important to have proper digital assessment tools.
- Provide diagnostic feedback – Assessments provide the teachers with the necessary feedback regarding students’ knowledge base, performance, and other needs. It helps the teachers to know what exactly has to be taught to the students and in which way it has to be taught.
- Restoring joy in teaching – Teaching becomes cheerful when it is easy to teach the students. But to easily teach them, it is vital to know their areas of interest, learning ability, and behaviour patterns for which taking the help of assessments is inevitable.
What are the Key Pillars of Assessment?
There are various characteristics that academic assessments must possess. The main 4 pillars are stated below-
- Validity – The assessment should measure what it intends to measure. It means it should provide the results regarding that specific context for which it has been carried out and not anything different.
For example, a science teacher cannot make a valid claim regarding a class’s understanding of chemistry based on his poor communication skills.
- Reliability – Reliability and validity are both interdependent. Effective assessment design, implementation, and evaluation tend to produce reliable results. In simple terms, reliability means the assessment outcomes should be accurate so that they can be used to make fair judgments.
- Purpose – Each assessment’s purpose cannot be the same; it can vary greatly. Like, earlier, the assessment was undertaken to evaluate student performance only. But now, the assessments also evaluate the teaching methods and provide feedback for improvements.
- Equitable – no matter which assessment tool is being used; it should not make any differentiation between any participants. If it does any favour or disfavours to any participant, then the assessment won’t be considered equitable. Students must be tested using methods and procedures that are most appropriate to them.
Forms of Student Assessments
Various forms of assessments can be undertaken to assess the students. The more assessments you rely on, the better the student’s performance will be. However, the two most common types of higher education assessment are –
- Summative assessment – The summative assessment is implemented at the end of the course period to sum up, student learning. It is concerned with the student’s learning outcomes and provides information about patterns of student achievement. These assessments help to know to what extent students have understood the subject.
They are utilized to estimate the effectiveness of educational programs, and they are considered to be evaluative rather than being mentioned as diagnostic.
- Formative assessment – The formative assessment evaluates the student learning over time. Its fundamental purpose is to enhance student learning during the learning process. By estimating the student’s level of achievement in advance, certain improvisation can be made in the tutoring strategies to bring the student’s actual performance closer to the benchmark performance.
As this assessment is conducted during the learning process, it allows the students and teachers to alter their learning and teaching strategies to improve performance outcomes.
How does the Assessment Benefit the Organizations?
There are various benefits that organizations can reap by ensuring proper assessment management. A few of those benefits are covered below –
- Improve learning skills – With constant planning, execution, data analysis, and many more things, assessments help improve students’ learning skills. Learning new skills always proffers the students a lot of joy and also influences them to do better than before.
- Students become self-learners – The feedback provided by the assessments helps the student to identify the area where they need to focus more. They tend to invent methods for improving their performance which in a broad sense is a self-learner behaviour induced by the assessments.
- Reveal the learning gaps – Not every student’s learning ability is the same. So, assessment helps the teacher know the learning ability of each student, and they can alter their teaching strategies according to the student’s unique requirements.
- Increase student engagement – When the students are regularly provided with feedback regarding their achievements, it boosts their morale, and they thrive on performing better by actively engaging in the lectures.
- Set goals and objectives – The assessments trigger the students’ goal-oriented behaviour. Especially the formative assessments benefit in doing so because they evaluate the performance after regular intervals and provide feedback, with which students can set targets and goals, and then continuously work hard to achieve them.
- Maximize academic achievement – With the help of assessments, the students can be congratulated for their small achievements. This brings positivity inside the mind of students, and it motivates them to perform better to maximize their academic achievement.
Why should Organisations Opt for Online Assessment Tools?
The assessment tools provided by online platforms are considered to be a great blessing to the organizations due to the below-mentioned reasons –
- Prompt results – The assessment results earlier used to take more than a day to generate the results. But with the online exam conducting platform, the students can receive the results quickly. Speedy results help both the teachers and students to learn about the performance and make early improvements in learning and teaching skills for enhancing further results.
- Minimize error and time – Manual assessment consumes a lot of time because of excessive administrative work. Preparing the paper, seating arrangement, checking the paper, display the results all demand huge time and effort. Online assessment is a perfect substitute for manual assessments; in fact, more reliable one because there are minimum chances of errors.
- Flexibility – For any students who have a problem commuting to the institution can carry out their learning journey easily from a distance with the help of online assessments. This facility offers great flexibility to both teachers and students as it is not limited to one geographical area like manual assessments for which both students and teachers have to be present at the same place and at the same time.
- Environment friendly – The education system highlights the importance of saving trees, water, and other natural resources. But it would be best if it itself implements the same so that the students follow the same steps in the future.
Online assessments save not only time but also paper and energy. If considered more deeply, it also conserves the manufacturing energy, raw materials, fuels used for transportation, water, etc.
The main reason behind conducting assessments is to bring efficiency to the learning process. Moreover, the assessment platforms give a chance to the student for self-evaluation, which works better in improving their performance than evaluation from instructors. The assessment platform is not only limited to higher education, but they hold the hands of students till their placement in top-notch companies with their assessment tools for employees. However, for placing students’ feet in such companies, it is vital to employ academic assessment tools in the institute.
