For assessment to effectively measure or provide insight into students’ understanding, tasks or activities should be easily understood, measure what they intend to, and allow all students to demonstrate what they know, understand and can do.

When designing or evaluating assessment tasks, the following elements should be considered.

Equity

An equitable assessment is fair, inclusive, and accessible to all students, allowing demonstration of learning across a range of different contexts. Curriculum planning for every student – advice provides more information.

Validity

A valid assessment is one that accurately reflects the syllabus or learning outcomes it is designed to measure. It is designed in a format that allows students to successfully show what they know, understand, and can do in relation to the outcomes.

Assessment should relate to the learning that is taking, or has, taken place and should be designed using an appropriate assessment format to demonstrate that learning.

Reliability

A reliable assessment provides consistent and dependable results across a range of learners.

A reliable assessment should accurately measure what a student knows, understands, and can do without influence from chance, bias, systematic error, or cheating.

Practices to support consistent teacher judgement can improve the overall reliability of assessment.

Transparency

An assessment task is transparent when the purpose, meaning and requirements of the task are understood by all students.

Explicit quality criteria are included to clarify the aspects of learning being assessed. This can be particularly useful if it is discussed with students so they have the opportunity to contribute to or clarify the expectations.

Timeliness

Timeliness ensures that assessments are part of an ongoing process to monitor learning over time.

The view of the student formed from formative and summative assessment should be developed over time and change as the student grows in their learning.

Using different modes of assessment as part of the learning creates valuable opportunities for students to develop their understanding, serving a greater purpose than simply evaluating performance.

Feedback

An essential element of effective assessment is that specific, clear and timely feedback is provided to students.

This feedback is used by students to check their understanding and inform future learning goals.

Feedback can also be part of an iterative process built into a task (such as allowing students to submit drafts) in which feedback provided should be specific and forward focused.