Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Psychometric Practice and the Problem of Assessment in Education 819
notion and significance of social value is explored relative to assessment, it will be important to
explore the significance of the distinction between measurement and assessment, especially as
the latter has developed in education.
Assessment and Measurement
While it is common to suggest that measurement is simply a more precise form of assessment,
not to mention that the words measure and assess are given as synonyms in many thesauruses,
the latter is in my view a distinct although certainly related undertaking. According to the OED,
the words assess and assessment have been, for almost the duration of their 600 years in use,
bound up with notions of taxation, tributes, and fines. It is not until the nineteenth century that
assessment is used in the general sense as a synonym for estimation or evaluation. And it is only
as a manifestation of the fields of education and psychology in the twentieth century that the now
common meaning of assessment is derived. Thus the OED gives the fifth sense of the word as,
“The process or means of evaluating academic work; an examination or test.” Interestingly, the
word assessment is presented as almost synonymous with the word examination or test. And the
increasingly practical role psychology played in contemporary institutions gave rise to notions
of assessment as this one: “To evaluate (a person or thing); to estimate (the quality, value, or
extent of), to gauge or judge.” Examining the development of the use of the word we find this
quoted from the Office of Strategic Services’ 1948 publication, Assessment of Men: “A number
of psychologists and psychiatrists attempted to assess the merits of men and women recruited for
the Office of Strategic Services.” In this way, assessment has historically related to judgments of
value (originally in the form of taxation) with the more recent developments specific to judging the
value or deservedness of human beings. Furthermore, assessment seems focused on determining
quality (as in designations of good, authentic, etc.) not how much quality. Even the notion of good
enough appears as qualitative in nature, and is recognized as an assessment, not a measurement.
Further examination of the word suggests that not only is it bound up with judging human
value in particular, but that it also explicitly recognizes social hierarchy as a variable. Assess is a
form of the Latin verb meaning to “sit with.” In an educational assessment, the assessor sits with
the learner and assigns value. In this way, assessment is predicated on human relationships in a
way that measurement is not. The word’s alternative meaning clearly suggests the importance of
social position when it states that this person who “sits beside” (as in an assistant-judge) is one
who “shares another’s rank or dignity” and who is “skilled to advise on technical points.” It is also
then important to point out that assessments are now bound up with what is called professional
judgment.
Standards
Standards are the foundation of both assessment and measurement. In measurement, the object
of the standard is magnitude, the abstract expression of the extent of qualities of things or
phenomena. The object of the standard in assessment is value; the relation here is between
subject and object. With measurement, the magnitude makes possible the grasping of the relation
between quality and quantity. Standards in assessment make possible the judgment of value by
stipulating boundary points as indicators of quality (merit, worth, goodness, authenticity). In fact,
official educational assessment operates on the basis of establishing desired qualities and their
vertical classification, or placement in vertically structured category systems with the assistance
of numbers. This is what is being delineated when it is said that the task of validity is to determine
the meaning (value) of test scores. The validity discourse about test score meaning relative to
testing purpose is based on value not residing in things or phenomenon themselves, but in their