Best Type of Referenced Assessment for Online Learning

The four types of referenced assessments are:  ability, growth, criterion, and norm referenced tests.  The type of reference used will provide specific information, which is useful to educators.  Therefore, the type of reference used will depend on the type of information the educator needs.  This is dependent upon the purpose of the educator, the program or the course, which is in itself dependent upon the grade level of the course (primary or secondary).

Ability referenced assessments compare a learner’s performance with their potential performance.  Growth-referenced assessments compare a learner’s performance with past performance to determine growth.  Criterion-referenced assessments compare a learner’s performance with specific criteria such as goals, outcomes, or objectives.  Norm-referenced assessments compare a learner’s performance with a similar group of students. 

In my opinion, criterion-referenced assessments should be used in online assessments to grade students.  The goal of most online learning is for students to walk away with information and knowledge for the purpose of applying it in their profession.  According to The Centre for Learning and Professional Development at the University of Adelaide (2001), “…in higher education the aim is to also use the subject matter to teach students to think, to develop higher-level cognitive skills including metacognition (think about their thinking). Higher-level cognitive skills include solving problems, analyzing arguments, synthesizing information from different sources and applying what they are learning to new and unfamiliar contexts. To be effective, assessment needs to be an integral part of the learning environment and embedded into the design of the course which involves aligning learning objectives with assessment.”  In order to do this, educators often use formative assessments-testing that is done to diagnose what students haven’t grasped yet and still need in order to reach the objectives.  Again, the Centre (2011) says, “The purpose of student assessment is to provide support and feedback to enhance ongoing learning and identify what students have already achieved.”  Criterion referenced assessment will serve to help us know if students have met the objectives or not and it will drive instruction based on students’ needs as determined throughout the course.  According to Oosterhof, Conrad, and Ely (2008), formative assessments work well with criterion referenced interpretations because formative assessments cover specific content and show what a learner can or can’t do.  Therefore, criterion-referenced assessments help us to substantiate that students are well prepared for their profession and serve online purposes the best.

Growth-referenced assessments can provide information about how much a student has learned compared to what they knew when they started, but it will not inform us about their overall grasp of the content domain being taught in the course-unless, of course, the pre- and post-test is a good sampling of the content domain of the course.  Norm-referenced assessments would rank the students in the class (and only the students in the class), but that will not reveal whether or not the students learned what they need to know, neither will it allow us to compare them to a larger group of students in order to get a better indication of their performance.  Ability referenced assessments might tell us which students are most likely to succeed, but not how much a particular student is capable of accomplishing.

When we talk about K-12 online learners, we still need to establish that our learners have accomplished what we have set out for them to accomplish.  Therefore, criterion-referenced assessments are also best used here as well.  In both levels, primary and secondary, there are also needs for the other referenced assessments:  entrance, placement, diagnostic purposes name a few.

References

Centre for Learning and Professional Development.  (2011).  Effective Learning.  Retrieved June 16, 2011 from http://www.adelaide.edu.au/clpd/online/assessonline/effectivelrng/

Oosterhof, A., Conrad, R., Ely, D.  (2008).  Assessing Learners Online.  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Education, Inc.