Can we trust our teachers, their tools and techniques?

Abstract

There have been positive directions in formative assessment and school-based assessment. These assessments provide students opportunities to highlight their learning in a developmental and progressive manner in authentic settings. Learners are empowered to indicate, through their work, both the heuristics of the learning and content mastery. Teachers (or raters!) in schools have the arduous task of examining a student’s work (against a list of capabilities statements or through a set of criteria articulated in a rubric) and making objective judgements. Scores are assigned to various activities and tasks, which are then aggregated for a grade and reported to the students and relevant stakeholders. This paper highlights the problems with raw scores, its aggregation and the effect of raters (or teachers) on the scoring and grade assignment processes. It also discusses the challenges associated with rubrics and judgements, grade inflation and comparability. The use of Rasch and multilevel techniques is highlighted. The principles underlying objective measurement are included.