Lecture

Assessment of Learning: Validity and Reliability

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

Description

This lecture covers the foundations of assessment in higher education, focusing on validity and reliability. It explains the concepts of validity and reliability in assessment, using examples from physics education and student evaluation standards. The importance of contextualizing theoretical models in everyday life for validity and ensuring consistency in scores for reliability is discussed. Strategies for improving test reliability are presented, emphasizing the need for clear questions, consistent grading, and similar test conditions. The lecture concludes by highlighting the significance of testing what students are expected to learn, communicating key concepts, and ensuring clarity and consistency in assessments.

In MOOC

Teaching Science and Engineering

Some people think that teaching is simply a matter of knowing the content material and having the right kind of personality and experience. In fact, research evidence suggests that people can become effective teachers if they learn: the content of their discipline the different ways students learn this content and the problems they face with it how to manage learning in practice in a classroom. This MOOC focuses on the second and third of these elements. The ways in which students learn in science and eng

Official source

Quiz

Ontological neighbourhood

Psychology

Basic psychology: Psychometrics

Related concepts (24)

Educational assessment

Educational assessment or educational evaluation is the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data on the knowledge, skill, attitudes, aptitude and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning. Assessment data can be obtained from directly examining student work to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or can be based on data from which one can make inferences about learning. Assessment is often used interchangeably with test, but not limited to tests.

Formative assessment

Formative assessment, formative evaluation, formative feedback, or assessment for learning, including diagnostic testing, is a range of formal and informal assessment procedures conducted by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment. The goal of a formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work.

Validity (statistics)

Validity is the main extent to which a concept, conclusion or measurement is well-founded and likely corresponds accurately to the real world. The word "valid" is derived from the Latin validus, meaning strong. The validity of a measurement tool (for example, a test in education) is the degree to which the tool measures what it claims to measure. Validity is based on the strength of a collection of different types of evidence (e.g. face validity, construct validity, etc.) described in greater detail below.

Criterion validity

In psychometrics, criterion validity, or criterion-related validity, is the extent to which an operationalization of a construct, such as a test, relates to, or predicts, a theoretical representation of the construct—the criterion. Criterion validity is often divided into concurrent and predictive validity based on the timing of measurement for the "predictor" and outcome. Concurrent validity refers to a comparison between the measure in question and an outcome assessed at the same time.

Evaluation

In common usage, evaluation is a systematic determination and assessment of a subject's merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards. It can assist an organization, program, design, project or any other intervention or initiative to assess any aim, realisable concept/proposal, or any alternative, to help in decision-making; or to ascertain the degree of achievement or value in regard to the aim and objectives and results of any such action that has been completed.

Related lectures (38)

Student Evaluation of Teaching: Effective Strategies

Discusses the importance of student evaluations in improving teaching effectiveness and understanding student perspectives.

Design Learning Objectives

Explores designing clear learning objectives, chunking content, and managing cognitive load for effective course structuring.

Designing Experiments and Measuring Learning

Explores experimental design challenges in social sciences, emphasizing hypothesis formulation, variable control, and bias mitigation.

Assessment of Learning: Fairness, Bias, and Reliability MOOC: Teaching Science and Engineering

Delves into fairness, bias, and reliability in learning assessment, addressing unconscious bias and gender disparities in science education.