This course explores the implications of recent developments in cognitive psychology for educational assessment. While it is not a psychology course per se, we will survey key topics such as expertise research, knowledge representations, information-processing psychology, and the sociocultural perspective on learning. The focus will be on how these ideas are used in designing and using assessments. We will use ‘evidence-centered assessment design’ to frame our work as we analyze a range of examples, including performance assessment, portfolio assessments, simulation-based tasks, and intelligent tutoring systems.
The
class meets once a week. The first
part of the class will usually be a presentation by the instructor, followed
by discussion of the readings and of examples from readings or provided by
students, and sometimes group work in class.
Each student will be responsible for summarizing one of the readings
for the class sometime during the semester, and hosting the discussion of
that reading. In addition to this summary, additional assignments will be
short papers or essay questions, approximately every other week, based on
the readings and examples. The final
project will be the analysis of an assessment of the student’s choice (or
alternative topic, with instructor's permission).
Prerequisites:
EDMS 623 (intermediate-level educational measurement: classical test theory,
reliability, validity, etc.) and EDMS 651(Intermediate-level statistics:
regression, anova), or instructor permission.
The textbook is Knowing what students know (National Research Council, 2002. J. Pellegrino, N. Chudowsky, & R. Glaser (Eds.). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press). It is available online for free at http://www.nap.edu/books/0309072727/html/
Other readings will be made available online or can be checked out from the ETS Circulation Desk in the basement of Benjamin.