Teaching and Assessing Soft Skills - MASS - Measuring and ...

Standards-referenced assessment
In "standards-referenced testing" or "standards based assessment" criteria are given in the
level of course/curriculum content (or "curriculum frameworks") which describe what
students should know and be able to do at various grade levels. They also have performance
standards that define how much of the content standards students should know to reach
the "basic" or "proficient" or "advanced" level in the subject area. Tests are then based on
the standards and the results are reported in terms of these "levels". This way the arbitrary
determination of criteria (like the passing level) may be reduced (“Criterion- and Standards-
Referenced Tests | FairTest,” n.d.)
Construct-referenced assessment
Wiliam (2001) proposed construct-referenced assessment. He was critical of criterionreferenced
assessment, especially for high stakes testing, suggesting that it might lead to
‘teaching to the test’. That is, teachers may focus upon the specified criteria and not attend
to other aspects of the domain that were important, and because criteria tended to be
defined narrowly and specifically in terms of the assessment tasks that were set, criterion
based assessment might not yield the learning goals that were desired. Wiliam’s solution to
the problem was to use expert assessors who had shared understandings of the domain.
The innovative feature of such assessment is that no attempt is made to prescribe learning
outcomes. In that it is defined at all, it is defined simply as the consensus of the teachers
making the assessments. The assessment is not objective, in the sense that there are no
objective criteria for a student to satisfy, but the experience in England is that it can be
made reliable.
Formative Assessment
Formative assessment has the potential to enhance learning and performance. In their
review paper, Black and Wiliam (1998) identified two consistently important components of
formative assessment, namely feedback and self-assessment and these issues warrant some
discussion.
Feedback
Feedback is an essential component of formative assessment. According to Sadler (1989)
formative assessment is concerned with how judgments about the quality of student
responses (performance, pieces of work) can be used to shape and improve the student’s
competence by short-circuiting the randomness and inefficiency of trial-and-error learning.
(p. 120)
He continued (1989, p. 120) defining feedback as "information about how successfully
something has been or is being done." He drew upon Ramprasad’s (1983, p. 4) description of
feedback as “…information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level
of a system parameter which is used to alter the gap in some way.” The notion of a ‘gap to
be bridged’ and the role of feedback in that process were elaborated.
…the learner has to (a) possess a concept of the standard (or goal, or reference
level) being aimed for, (b) compare the actual (or current) level of performance
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