Specifying and Promulgating Achievement Standards
- 1 January 1987
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Oxford Review of Education
- Vol. 13 (2), 191-209
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0305498870130207
Abstract
Assessment practices, both at the classroom level and for the award of certificates, have traditionally followed norm‐referenced principles, although in recent years there has been an increasing interest in criterion‐referenced assessment. In the first part of this article, another approach (referred to as standards‐referenced assessment) is outlined. Sharing much of the motivation and philosophy of criterion‐referenced assessment, it makes direct and extensive use of teachers’ qualitative judgments. In principle, standards‐referenced assessment is applicable to a wide variety of school subjects, and attempts to provide external, visible standards for the use of both teachers and students. In the second part of the article, four methods of specifying and promulgating educational standards are identified and described. The four make use of numerical cut‐offs, tacit knowledge, exemplars, and verbal descriptions. It is argued that the last two of these taken together provide the most promising framework for a standards‐referenced assessment system within which teachers may make sound qualitative judgments about the achievements of their students both for improving learning and for summative reporting.Keywords
This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit:
- Do Tests Measure those Constructs that People Interpret Them to Measure?Educational Theory, 1986
- A Consumer’s Guide to Setting Performance Standards on Criterion-Referenced TestsReview of Educational Research, 1986
- The Origins and Functions of Evaluative CriteriaEducational Theory, 1985
- A METHOD FOR REACHING A COMPROMISE BETWEEN ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE STANDARDS IN EXAMINATIONSJournal of Educational Measurement, 1984
- Distinguishing the Many Varieties of Criterion-referenced TestsReview of Educational Research, 1980
- Procedures and Results of an Evaluation of WritingEducational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1980
- Education and distributive justice: Some reflections on grading systems.American Psychologist, 1979
- Evaluation Models for Criterion-Referenced Testing: Views Regarding Mastery and Standard-SettingReview of Educational Research, 1976
- Instructional technology and the measurement of learing outcomes: Some questions.American Psychologist, 1963
- I.—ON GRADINGMind, 1950